1.A woman may display wealth, but she may not display only her wealth, by her dress; or else she defeats her ends.She must also suggest some distinction of character as well as of wealth; for though her dress may owe more to her dressmaker than to herself, yet there is a traditional assumption that, being less busy than man with external affairs, she can give more time to taking thought as to her dress.Even under the sway of modern fashions, to be "well dressed" - not "expensively dressed" is a reasonable minor aim for those who desire to be distinguished for their faculties and abilities; and this will be still more the case if the evil dominion of the wanton vagaries of fashion should pass away.For to arrange costumes beautiful in themselves, various and well-adapted to their purposes, is an object worthy of high endeavour; it belongs to the same class, though not to the same rank in that class, as the painting of a good picture.
2.It is true that many active-minded working men prefer cramped lodgings in a town to a roomy cottage in the country; but that is because they have a strong taste for those activities for which a country life offers little scope.
3.See Book II, ch.III, sec.3.
4.As a minor point it may be noticed that those drinks which stimulate the mental activities are largely displacing those which merely gratify the senses.The consumption of tea is increasing very fast, while that of alcohol is stationary; and there is in all ranks of society a diminishing demand for the grosser and more immediately stupefying forms of alcohol.
5.This doctrine is laid down by Banfield, and adopted by Jevons as the key of his position.It is unfortunate that here as elsewhere Jevons' delight in stating his case strongly has led him to a conclusion, which not only is inaccurate, but does mischief by implying that the older economists were more at fault than they really were.Banfield says "the first proposition of the theory of consumption is that the satisfaction of every lower want in the scale creates a desire of a higher character." And if this were true, the above doctrine, which he bases on it, would be true also.But, as Jevons points out (Theory, 2nd Ed.p.59), it is not true: and he substitutes for it the statement that the satisfaction of a lower want permits a higher want to manifest itself.That is a true and indeed an identical proposition: but it affords no support to the claims of the Theory of Consumption to supremacy.
6.Political Economy, ch.II.
7.The formal classification of Wants is a task not without interest; but it is not needed for our purposes.The basis of most modern work in this direction is to be found in Hermann's Staatswirtschaftliche Untersuchungen, Ch.II, where wants are classified as "absolute and relative, higher and lower, urgent and capable of postponement, positive and negative, direct and indirect, general and particular, constant and interrupted, permanent and temporary, ordinary and extraordinary, present and future, individual and collective, private and public." Some analysis of wants and desires is to be found in the great majority of French and other Continental treatises on economics even of the last generation; but the rigid boundary which English writers have ascribed to their science has excluded such discussions.And it is a characteristic fact that there is no allusion to them in Bentham's Manual of Political Economy, although his profound analysis of them in the Principles of Morals and legislation and in the Table of the Springs of Human Action has exercised a wide-spread influence.Hermann had studied Bentham; and on the other hand Banfield, whose lectures were perhaps the first ever given in an English University that owed much directly to German economic thought, acknowledges special obligations to Hermann.In England the way was prepared for Jevons' excellent work on the theory of wants, by Bentham himself; by Senior, whose short remarks on the subject are pregnant with far-reaching hints; by Banfield, and by the Australian Hearn.Hearn's Plutology or Theory of the Efforts to satisfy Human Wants is at once simple and profound: it affords an admirable example of the way in which detailed analysis may be applied to afford a training of a very high order for the young, and to give them an intelligent acquaintance with the economic conditions of life, without forcing upon them any particular solution of those more difficult problems on which they are not yet able to form an independent judgment.At about the same time as Jevons' Theory appeared, Carl Menger gave a great impetus to the subtle and interesting studies of wants and utilities by the Austrian school of economists: they had already been initiated by von Thunen, as is indicated in the Preface to this Volume.
