Once it was finally realized that the desire of ordinary people to buy such consumer goods, and not their poverty or frugality as used to be thought, was the principal source of their industriousness and their productivity, then the fear of “luxury” that had bedeviled the eighteenth century died away. It no longer made any sense to say, as John Adams archaically said in 1814, that “human nature, in no form of it, ever could bear Prosperity.”
