of a public library or museum; but it is also, and perhaps equally, true of the more commonplace work of participation in such organisations and movements as are distinctively upper-class organisations. These serve to authenticate the pecuniary reputability of their members, as well as gratefully to keep them in mind of their superior status by pointing the contrast between themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the work of amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances and deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of motives of a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction or a decent good fame is sought by this method is evidence of a prevalent sense of the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a constituent factor in the habits of thought of modern communities.
In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that proceed on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious interest, it is to be noted that the women participate more actively and more persistently than the men—except, of course, in the case of such works as require a large expenditure of means. The dependent pecuniary position of the women disables them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards the general range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood or clergy of the less naïvely devout sects, or the secularised denominations, are associated with the class of the women. This is as the theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this clergy stands
