ABSTRACT
The vulgarly ostentatious scale of expenditure which is the fashion of many wealthy and aristocratic persons is steadily debasing our ideal of life. Regional collections of biographies brought together from county and town the lives and careers of those wealthy magnates whose evident enterprise, prodigious fortunes, and philanthropic munificence provided exemplars for the less fortunate but equally ambitious to follow. F. W. Headely in his Darwinism and Modern Socialism, published in 1909, attacked those who lived off their investments as ‘parasitic’ on the workers, and inherited fortunes as clogging the wheels of enterprise. Consumption, the use of wealth, was of paramount importance in determining the increase and distribution of wealth: ‘in the idler wealth comes to an end, in the worker it turns into muscle and brain power, and is eternally reproduced by them’. For Smart, a former businessman turned economist and economic historian, the process of wealth creation was less problematic than its dissipation.
