§1.We may now apply these general considerations regarding the evolution of wants to class and individual standards of consumption.In a concrete class standard of consumption we may conveniently distinguish three determinant factors: 1st.The primary organic factor, the elements in consumption imposed by general or particular conditions of physical environment, such as soil, climate, in relation to physical needs.2nd.
The industrial factor, the modifications in organic needs due directly or indirectly to conditions of work.3rd.The conventional factor, those elements in a standard of consumption not based directly upon considerations of physical or economic environment but imposed by social custom.
So far as the first factor is concerned, we are for the most part in the region of material necessaries in which, as we have already seen, the organic securities for human utility are strongest.Where any population has for many generations been settled in a locality, it must adapt itself in two ways to the physical conditions of that locality.Its chief constituents of food, clothing, shelter, etc., must be accommodated to all the more permanent and important conditions of soil, climate, situation and of the flora and fauna of the country.A tropical people cannot be great meat-eaters or addicted to strong drinks, though the materials for both habits may be abundant.An arctic people, on the other hand, must find in animal fats a principal food, and in the skins of animals a principal article of clothing.
In a country where earthquakes frequently occur, the materials and structure of the houses must be light.In the same country the people of the mountains, the valleys, the plains, the sea-shores, will be found with necessary differences in their fundamental standard of consumption.It is, indeed, self-evident that physical environment must exercise an important selective and rejective power represented in the material standard of consumption.So far as man can modify and alter the physical environment, as by drainage, forestry, or the destruction of noxious animals or bacteria, he may to that extent release his standard of consumption for this regional control.
Primitive man, again, and even most men in comparatively advanced civilisations, are confined for the chief materials of food, shelter and other necessaries, to the resources of their country or locality.They must accommodate their digestions and their tastes to the foods that can be raised conveniently and in sufficient quantities in the neighbourhood: they must build their houses and make their domestic and other utensils out of the material products within easy reach.The early evolution of a standard of necessary consumption, working under this close economy of trial and error, appears to guarantee a free, natural, instinctive selection of organically sound consumables.
The primary physical characteristics of a country, also of course, affect with varying degrees of urgency those elements in a standard of consumption not directly endowed with strong survival value, those which we call conveniences, comforts, luxuries.The modes and materials of bodily adornment, the styles of domestic and other architecture, religious ceremonies, forms of recreation, will evidently be determined in a direct manner by climatic and other physical considerations.
Recent civilisation, with its rapid extensive spread of communications, and its equally rapid and various expansion of the arts of industry, has brought about an interference with this natural economy which has dangers as well as advantages.The swift expansion of commerce brings great quantities of foods and other consumables from remote countries, and places them at the disposal of populations under conditions which give no adequate security for organic utility of consumption.Under an economy of natural selection exotics are by right suspect, at any rate until time has tried them.The incorporation of articles such as tea and tobacco in our popular consumption has taken place under conditions which afford no proper guarantee of their individual utility, or against the bad reactions they may cause in the whole complex standards of consumption.
The back stroke of this commercial expansion is seen in such occurrences as the deforestation of great tracts of country and the alteration of the climatic character, with its effects upon the lives of the inhabitants.
But though certain errors and wastes attend these processes of commercialism and industrialism, they must not be exaggerated.There is no reason to hold that mankind in general has been so deeply and firmly specialised in needs and satisfactions by local physical conditions that he cannot advantageously avail himself of the material products of a wider environment.
Though the digestive and assimilative apparatus may not be so adaptable as the brain, there is no ground for holding that conformity during many generations to a particular form of diet precludes the easy adoption of exotic elements often containing better food-properties in more assimilable forms.A Chinese population, habituated to rice, can quickly respond in higher physical efficiency to a wheat diet, nor is the fact that bananas are a tropical fruit detrimental to their value as food for Londoners.
How far the purely empirical way in which foods and other elements in a necessary standard have been evolved can be advantageously corrected or supplemented by scientific tests, is a question remaining for discussion after the other factors in standards of consumption have been brought under inspection.
