IN that rude state of society which precedes the extension
of commerce and the improvement of manufactures,
when those expensive luxuries which commerce and man-
ufactures can alone introduce, are altogether unknown, the
person who possesses a large revenue, I have endeavoured to
show in the third book of this Inquiry, can spend or enjoy
that revenue in no other way than by maintaining nearly as
many people as it can maintain. A large revenue may at all
times be said to consist in the command of a large quantity of
the necessaries of life. In that rude state of things it is com-
monly paid in a large quantity of those necessaries, in the
materials of plain food and coarse clothing, in corn and cattle,
in wool and raw hides. When neither commerce nor manu-
factures furnish any thing for which the owner can ex-
change the greater part of those materials which are over
and above his own consumption, he can do nothing with the
surplus but feed and clothe nearly as many people as it will
feed and clothe. A hospitality in which there is no luxury,
and a liberality in which there is no ostentation, occasion, in
this situation of things, the principal expences of the rich and
the great. But these, I have likewise endeavoured to show
in the same book, are expences by which people are not very
apt to ruin themselves. There is not, perhaps, any selfish
pleasure so frivolous, of which the pursuit has not sometimes
ruined even sensible men. A passion for cock-fighting has
ruined many. But the instances, I believe, are not very nu-
merous of people who have been ruined by a hospitality or
liberality of this kind; though the hospitality of luxury and
the liberality of ostentation have ruined many. Among our
feudal ancestors, the long time during which estates used to
continue in the same family, sufficiently demonstrates the

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