The purpose is simply to point out what is the nature of the
relation of these classes to the industrial process and to
economic institutions. Their office is of a parasitic character,
and their interest is to divert what substance they may to their
own use, and to retain whatever is under their hand. The
conventions of the business world have grown up under the
selective surveillance of this principle of predation or
parasitism. They are conventions of ownership; derivatives, more
or less remote, of the ancient predatory culture. But these
pecuniary institutions do not entirely fit the situation of
today, for they have grown up under a past situation differing
somewhat from the present. Even for effectiveness in the
pecuniary way, therefore, they are not as apt as might be. The
changed industrial life requires changed methods of acquisition;
and the pecuniary classes have some interest in so adapting the
pecuniary institutions as to give them the best effect for
acquisition of private gain that is compatible with the
continuance of the industrial process out of which this gain
arises. Hence there is a more or less consistent trend in the
leisure-class guidance of institutional growth, answering to the
pecuniary ends which shape leisure-class economic life.
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