Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



those against property. You may beat your 

 wife within an inch of her Hfe and only get three 

 months ; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be 

 " sent " for years. So again, gambling by thou- 

 sands on Change is respectable enough, but pitch 

 and toss for half-pence in the streets is low, and 

 must be dealt with by the police ; while it is a 

 mere commonplace to say that the high-class 

 swindler is " received " in society from which 

 a more honest but patch-coated brother would 

 infallibly be rejected. As Walt Whitman has it, 

 " There is plenty of glamour about the most 

 damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special 

 and general, of the feudal and dynastic world 

 over there, with its personnel of lords and queens 

 and courts, so well-dressed and handsome. But 

 the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their 

 sins gaunt and ill-bred." 



Thus we see that though there are, for instance 

 in the England of to-day, a variety of classes and 

 a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion 

 and morality, one of these codes, namely that of 

 the ruling class whose watchword is property, 

 is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly 

 suppose that in any nation from the time when 

 it first becomes divided into well-marked classes 

 this is or has been the case. In one age — the 

 commercial age — the code of the commercial or 

 money-loving class is dominant ; in another — 

 the military — the code of the warrior class is 

 dominant ; in another — the religious — the code 

 of the priestly class ; and so on. And even 



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