Macaulay's complacency was in no way qualified by the conventional reminder that his own age—since the process of accumulation continues without any foreseeable end—would appear to future generations just as primitive in its standard of cleanliness and comfort as earlier ages appeared to him and his contemporaries, hence equally eligible for perversely wistful retrospection.

The more thoughtful among Macaulay's contemporaries, however, could not entirely suppress the disturbing consideration that a social order based on the promise of universal abundance might find it hard to justify even the minimal sacrifices presupposed by Adam Smith's otherwise self‐ regulating economy. Hume had astutely pointed out, when the philosophy of plenty was still in its infancy, that it might weaken even the residual inclination to defer gratification. Human beings "are always much inclin'd to prefer present interest to distant and remote," he observed ; "nor is it easy for them to resist the temptation of any advantage that they may immediately enjoy." As long as "the pleasures of life [were] few," this form of temptation did not pose a great threat to social order. Commercial societies, however, could be expected to intensify the pursuit of "feverish, empty amusements"; and the "avidity ... of acquiring goods and possessions" was "insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society."

In the nineteenth century, the hope that commerce would make men "easy and sociable," not acquisitive and rapacious, came to rest largely on the institutionalization of deferred gratification supposedly provided by the family—the heart and soul of the middle-class way of life. Nineteenth-century philanthropists, humanitarians, and social reformers argued with one voice that the revolution of rising expectations meant a higher standard of domestic life, not an orgy of self-indulgence activated by fantasies of inordinate personal wealth, of riches painlessly acquired through speculation or fraud, of an abundance of wine and women. That a commercial society fostered such ambitions troubled them no end; and it was to counter this tawdry dream of success, this unbridled urge to

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