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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



having all the dissipations and distractions of this 

 class, they are much more seriously alive to the 

 power of intellect and knowledge, to the power 

 of beauty. The sense of conduct, too, meets 

 with fewer temptations. To some extent, how- 

 ever, their contiguousness to the aristocratic class 

 materializes them, as it does the class of newly- 

 enriched people. The most palpable action is on 

 the young, and on their standard of life and en- 

 joyment. But in general, for this whole class, 

 established facts, the materialism they see reg- 

 nant, too much block their mental horizon, and 

 limit the possibilities of things to them. They are 

 deficient in openness and flexibility of mind, in free 

 play of ideas, in faith and ardor. Civilized they 

 are, but they are not much of a civilizing force ; 

 they are somehow bounded and ineffective. 



So on the middle class they produce singularly 

 little effect. What the middle class sees is that 

 splendid piece of materialism, the aristocratic 

 class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of 

 their reach, with a standard of social life and 

 manners, the offspring of that wealth and luxury 

 seeming utterly out of their reach also ; and thus 

 they are thrown back upon themselves — upon a 

 defective type of religion, a narrow range of in- 

 tellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, 

 a low standard of manners. And the lower class 

 see before them the aristocratic class, and its 

 civilization, such as it is, even infinitely more out 

 of their reach than out of that of the middle class ; 

 while the life of the middle class, with its un- 

 lovely types of religion, thought, beauty, and 

 manners, has naturally, in general, no great at- 

 tractions for them either ; and so they too are 

 thrown back upon themselves ; upon their beer, 

 their gin, and their fun. Now, then, you will 

 understand what I meant by saying that our ine- 

 quality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes 

 our middle, brutalizes our lower. And the greater 

 the inequality the more marked is its bad action 

 upon the middle and lower classes. In Scotland 

 the landed aristocracy fills the scene, as is well 

 known, still more than in England ; the other 

 classes are more squeezed back and effaced, and 

 the social civilization of the lower middle class, 

 and of the poorest class, in Scotland, is an exam- 

 ple of the consequences. Compared with the 

 same class even in England, the Scottish lower 

 middle class is most visibly, to vary Mr. Charles 

 Sumner's phrase, less well-bred, less careful in 

 personal habits and in social conventions, less 

 refined. Let any one who doubts it go, after is- 

 suing from the aristocratic solitudes which pos- 

 sess Loch Lomond, let him go and observe the 



shopkeepers and the middle class in Dumbarton, 

 and Greenock, and Gourock, and the places alonj.; 

 the mouth of the Clyde. And for the poorest 

 class, who that has seen it can ever forget the 

 hardly human horror, the abjection and uncivil- 

 izedness of Glasgow ? 



What a strange religion, then, is our religion 

 of inequality ! Romance is good in its way, but 

 ours is not even a romantic religion. No doubt 

 our aristocracy is an object of strong public in- 

 terest. The Times itself bestows a leading arti- 

 cle, by way of epithalamium, on the Duke of Nor- 

 folk's marriage. And those journals of a new 

 type, full of talent, and which interest me particu- 

 larly because they seem as if they were written 

 by the young lion of our youth — the young lion 

 grown mellow and, as the French say, viveur, ar- 

 rived at his full and ripe knowledge of the world, 

 and minded to enjoy the smooth evening of his 

 days — those journals, in the main a sort of social 

 gazette of the aristocracy, are apparently not 

 read by that class only which they most concern, 

 but are read with avidity by other classes also. 

 And the common people, too, have undoubtedly, 

 as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for 

 a lord. Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon 

 it of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the 

 political necessities of George III., is for the im- 

 agination a singularly modern and uninterest- 

 ing one. Its splendor of station, wealth, show, 

 and luxury, is then what the other classes really 

 admire in it ; and this is not an elevating admira- 

 tion. So that when Mr. Gladstone invites us to 

 call our love of inequality "the complement of 

 the love of freedom or its negative pole, or the 

 shadow which the love of freedom casts, or the 

 reverberation of its voice in the halls of the con- 

 stitution," we must surely answer that all this 

 mystical eloquence is not in the least necessary to 

 explain so simple a matter ; that our love of in- 

 equality is really the vulgarity in us, and the 

 brutality, admiring and worshiping the splendid 

 materiality. 



Our present social organization, however, will 

 and must endure until our middle class is pro- 

 vided with some better ideal of life than it has 

 now. That organization has been an appointed 

 stage in our growth ; it has been of good use, and 

 has enabled us to do great things. But the use 

 is at an end, and the stage is over. Ask yourselves 

 if you do not often feel in yourselves a sense 

 that, in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of 

 so many excellent persons among us, we begin 

 somehow to flounder and to beat the air ; that we 

 seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line 



