boy who plays pitch-and-toss with halfpence of the ways in which wealth might be made conducive to undertakings worthy of absorbing human energy. When, on pretence of cultivating society, we invent a whole cumbrous social apparatus which makes all rational conversation impossible, we know that the display of wealth has become an end to which we are ready to sacrifice our ostensible purpose. Now, I suggest that such luxury, such exaltation of the machinery above the ultimate good, corresponds pretty nearly to the distinction between the desires which lead to the rightful use and those which lead to the shameful misuse of wealth in a social sense. Human nature, indeed, is singularly complex, and it is impossible to deny that the hope of acquiring such luxuries may incidentally lead to that increase of industry and development of national resources which, as we have seen, is the ground upon which it is defended. The industrious apprentice may have been stimulated to become Lord Mayor by the odours from his master's turtle-soup; Arkwright, perhaps, was induced to invent the machinery which revolutionised the cotton manufactures by the hope of becoming Sir Richard, and rivalling the coarse luxury of some stupid Squire Western. But we cannot doubt that upon a large scale the love of the grosser indulgences is bad, even from its purely economical point of view. If, incidentally, it encourages industry, it far more directly and necessarily encourages wasteful expenditure. If a rich man can only spend his thousands at a gambling-table, the poorer man cannot be blamed for gambling with a thimble-rigger. When Solomon set up his domestic establishment, every shopkeeper in Jerusalem might be encouraged to marry an extra wife. If a rich man, who has enough to saturate a healthy appetite, tries how much money he can spend, like the old classical epicures, upon new dishes of nightingales' tongues, you can hardly expect the poorer man to refrain from an extra glass of gin. Briefly, so far as the resources of a nation are spent upon the mere ostentation--which we call vulgar, to imply that it is spending for the sake of expense, foolishly trying to get more pleasure for an appetite already gorged to excess, by simply increasing the stimulus--it is encouraging all the forces which make rather for waste than increased productiveness, and justifying the natural jealousy of the poorer. So far, that is, as a desire for wealth means a desire to consume as much as possible on supersaturating the lower appetites, the commonest argument against private property in general is not only plausible but justified. I should say, then, that luxury in a bad sense begins wherever in expenditure it indicates an insufficient sense of the responsibility which attaches to all wealth. This does not condemn an expenditure which may seem, from some points of view, luxurious; though, as I have said, I cannot profess to draw any distinct line in what is