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The habits of thought which are so formed under the guidance of teachers and scholastic traditions have an economic value a value as affecting the serviceability of the individual no less real than the similar economic value of the habits of thought formed without such guidance under the discipline of everyday life.
The conventional insistence on a modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability in matters of scholarship in much the same way as the same principle has influenced our judgment of the serviceability of manufactured goods.
The result is quite as often a virtually complete suppression of all elements that would bear scrutiny as expressions of beauty, or of serviceability, and the substitution of evidences of misspent ingenuity and labor, backed by a conspicuous ineptitude; until many of the objects with which we surround ourselves in everyday life, and even many articles of everyday dress and ornament, are such as would not be tolerated except under the stress of prescriptive tradition.
It is true, their draught on the requisite sentimental and pecuniary support is fortified with large claims of serviceability to the common good, and these claims are somewhat easily, indeed eagerly, conceded and acted upon; although the alleged benefit to the common good will scarcely be visible except in the light of glory shed by the blazing torch of patriotism.
It would materially add to the serviceability of the law, for the purpose we now have in view, if it were also prescribed that all goods released from storage for interstate shipment should have plainly marked upon each package the selling or market price at which they went into storage.
Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
So far as regards the serviceability of the individual for the purposes of the collective life, emulative efficiency is of use only indirectly if at all.
In all such useful articles a close scrutiny will discover certain features which add to the cost and enhance the commercial value of the goods in question, but do not proportionately increase the serviceability of these articles for the material purposes which alone they ostensibly are designed to serve.
Fire Industrial Fire, Court of Ages The two Fire panels represent this element in its two phases of serviceability. The first shows its simplest use, that of giving warmth to man; the second, its more developed employment as an agent of manufacture. In the "Primitive Fire," a gray, woodsy plume of smoke rises to the autumn sky.
Without reflection or analysis, we feel that what is inexpensive is unworthy. "A cheap coat makes a cheap man." "Cheap and nasty" is recognized to hold true in dress with even less mitigation than in other lines of consumption. On the ground both of taste and of serviceability, an inexpensive article of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim "cheap and nasty."
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