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Updated: May 4, 2025
Indeed, where the scheme is well developed even sports are accounted doubtfully legitimate for the members of the highest rank. To the lower grades of the leisure class certain other employments are open, but they are employments that are subsidiary to one or another of these typical leisure-class occupations.
Indirectly, therefore, the bent given to the growth of economic institutions by the leisure-class influence is of very considerable industrial consequence. The institution of a leisure class has an effect not only upon social structure but also upon the individual character of the members of society.
But now they spent their evenings at dinner-parties, and their days lounging about in two or three expensive cafes, reading the afternoon papers, exchanging gossip, and acquiring the necessary stock of cynicism for their next picture of leisure-class life. It was what might have been described as the "court method" of literary achievement.
The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the education of women serves to show in what manner and to what extent learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly and leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what approach has been made by the truly learned to the modern, economic or industrial, matter-of-fact standpoint.
But while it may be true that the cap and gown, and the more strenuous observance of scholastic proprieties which came with them, were floated in on this post-bellum tidal wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt true that such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in the college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the requisite pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of the country up to the leisure-class requirements in the higher learning.
Such are, for instance, the manufacture and care of arms and accoutrements and of war canoes, the dressing and handling of horses, dogs, and hawks, the preparation of sacred apparatus, etc. The lower classes are excluded from these secondary honourable employments, except from such as are plainly of an industrial character and are only remotely related to the typical leisure-class occupations.
This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation more specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in the service of the supernatural leisure class.
It should be noted that in the graduated appreciation of varieties of horses and of dogs, such as one meets with among people of even moderately cultivated tastes in these matters, there is also discernible another and more direct line of influence of the leisure-class canons of reputability.
The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and the leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this point of view only.
From which in turn it should follow that the rest of what is comprised under the general caption of "culture" will find a place only in the interstices of leisure-class expenditure and only at the hands of aberrant members of the class of the gently-bred. It would be a virtual suppression of such native gifts among the common folk, not a definitive and all-inclusive suppression.
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