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Let us carry our supposition a step farther still, and, invited by the for- tunate owner of this bark of pleasure, let us go upon a cruise, and in the course of it drop anchor in some mountain-girdled loch, where lives a friend to whom the kind fates have given a deer forest. We find our friend there living like a potentate among gamekeepers and ghillies. Money is circu- lating of course. He is fulfilling nobly the function of spending. And there is work being done, strenuous enough ; for we may be sure this following is not fed and housed for doing nothing. But when all is over, and the season is ended, what is there to show ? No instrument of commerce or of industry, not even an instrument of pleasure like the yacht, but only some score or two of stags and a few hundred brace of grouse, all of which have long ago dis- appeared before the appetites of these men of the chase and their friends.
The conclusion to which we are irresistibly driven is obvious : Who will deny that, from the commercial point of view, it would have been tenfold better had those shipwrights, who spent their strength and expended material on the yacht, been employed in putting into the hands of their fellow-countrymen an instrument, a steamer or a ship, the possession of which would enable them to increase the national wealth by bringing useful articles into the hands fittest to use them to industrial advantage? And, again, from the same point of view, it would have been more than tenfold better, had all the effort expended through the long autumn days by ghillies in that deer forest been given to work that left something behind it some- thing more applicable to commerce and industry than stories, however charming, about bagging grouse or stalking deer. 1
Such, then, is the general argument against luxury which is made by the economist. Now it may be that luxury of the above-mentioned type may be defended upon other than eco- nomic ground ; but it must be admitted, I think, that, from a purely commercial and economic standpoint, there can be no valid and sufficient defense. The keepers of the deer park are wasting their labor-power as far as the production of wealth is concerned, and economic waste is economic waste, and no amount of sophistry or word-jugglery can make it anything else. It is not enough to say that men are given an oppor- tunity to earn an honest livelihood. This argument is sufficient in the minds of many persons ; but it is certainly super- ficial, and the analysis of the matter is only partial. The wealth produced by an individual does not depend alone upon the amount of work done by him, but upon the return which
1 Ethics of Citizenship, pp. 196-9.
