splendour, means for leisure, for enjoyment—for a very keen self-realisation of a kind by the few at the expense of the many. And the masterful few made that form of decorated civilization more sure for themselves by extending a good deal of the decorative element to the subservient lives around them. The slaves wore fine liveries and lorded it over lower slaves, the favourite wives lived in luxury and laziness, eating sweets and spending their days in the frivolous mysteries of the toilet.
At a certain point in the social scale this form of ornamental existence produced great misery, great hardships, great abasement. But it was not instituted and maintained for that reason. Those underlying conditions were a drawback, they were a misuse of human nature employed as a basis for that ornamental superstructure to build on. And out of that underlying misuse came the weakness and the eventual decay of that once flourishing school of ornament.
But when that school of ornament was threatened by other schools, it was ready to fight to the death for its ornamental superfluities—for polygamy, for slavery, for power over others, which had come to mean for it all that made life worth living! Life was quite capable of being carried on without those things—was, and is, happily lived by other races to the accompaniment of another set of ornaments which those races think more
