CHAPTER II.
LUXURY.
LUXURY IN GENERAL.
The idea conveyed by the word luxury is an essentially relative one. Every individual calls all consumption with which he can dispense himself, and every class that which seems not indispensable to themselves, luxury. The same is true of every age and nation. Just as young people ridicule every old fashion as pedantry, every new fashion is censured by old people as luxury.[224-1]
But (§ I) a higher civilization always finds expression in an increased number and an increased urgency of satisfied wants. Yet, there is a limit at which new or intensified wants cease to be an element of higher civilization, and become elements of demoralization. Every immoral and every unwise want exceeds this limit.[224-2] Immoral wants are not only those the satisfaction of which wounds the conscience, but also those in which the necessities of the soul are postponed to the affording of superfluities to the body; and where the enjoyment of the few is purchased at the expense of the wretchedness of the many. And not only those are unwise or imprudent for which the voluntary outlay is greater than one's income, but those also where the indispensable is made to suffer for the dispensable.
Thus it was in Athens, in the time of Demosthenes, when the festivities of the year cost more than the maintenance of the fleet; when Euripides' tragedies came dearer to the people than the Persian war in former times. There was even a law passed (Ol. 107,4) prohibiting the application of the dramatic fund to purposes of war under pain of death.[224-3]
In the history of any individual people, it may be shown with approximate certainty at what point luxury exceeded its salutary limits. But in the case of two different nations, it is quite possible that what was criminal prodigality with the one, may have been a salutary enjoyment of life with the other; in case their economic (wirthschaftlichen) powers are different. Precisely as in the case of individuals, where for instance, the daily drinking of table wine may be simplicity in the rich and immoral luxury in the case of a poor father of a family.[224-4] Healthy reason has this peculiarity, that where people will not listen to it, it never hesitates to make itself[TN 50] felt. (Benjamin Franklin.)[224-5]
However, the luxury of a period always throws itself, by way of preference, on those branches of commodities which are cheapest.
[224-1] Stuart, Principles, II, ch. 30, Ferguson, History of Civil Society, VI, 2. Thus Dandolus, Chron. Venet., 247, tells of the wife of a doge at Constantinople who was so given to luxury that she ate with a golden fork instead of her fingers. But she was punished for this outrage upon nature: her body began to stink even while she was alive. In the introduction to Hollinshed's Chronicon, 1557, there is a bitter complaint that, a short time previous, so many chimneys had been erected in England, that so many earthen and tin dishes had been introduced in the place of wooden ones. Another author finds fault that oak was then used in building instead of willow, and adds that formerly the men were of oak but now of willow. Slaney, On rural Expenditure, 41. Compare Xenoph., Cyrop., VIII, 8, 17.