Class

“ What books and newspapers do these boys read, what talk do they hear, what interests or amusements do they find in the theatre, the tavern, the streets, the home, and the church? What has been the training of the lad of the upper class—that class, small in number but great in influence, which, being lifted above any sordid pressure of material care, should be the spiritual leader of the classes below them—a class which has ten talents committed to it, and which inherits the grand old maxim, Noblesse oblige? ”

“ Can a class--whatever its pretense to culture may be--can a class, that, in story and picture and music and play, counts greatest in art those who most effectively arouse the basest passions of which the human being is capable, be rightly judged sane? ”

“ I have found that to grow acquainted with the class that is the chief object of social legislation is to see more plainly the room for improvement, and also to see how much better, how much sounder, that class is than it appeared to be from the outside: how much might be gained, of material advantage especially, and at the same time how much there is to be lost of those qualities of character which have been acquired through long training and by infinite sacrifice. ”

“ Nothing is more calculated to impress upon a class a worthy and moral character, than the consciousness that it is destined to become a ruling class, that it is called upon to raise the principle of its class to the principle of the entire age, to convert its idea into the leading idea of the whole of society and thus to form this society by impressing upon it its own character. ”

“ And we began to think that class is a habit that can be changed in half a generation; a man who is a newsboy at seventeen may be a baronet at fifty and a viscount at seventy; but race is a tree planted deeply in firm soil. We can change our class as easily as we can change our clothes; but English blood is English blood in the pit, in Mayfair, in the shires ”

“ A class which has marched for ages in the first rank has acquired, in this long and uncontested exercise of greatness, a certain loftiness of heart, a natural confidence in its strength, and a habit of being looked up to, which makes it the most resisting element in the frame of society. ”

“ Better than any work, avowedly on history, it graphically traces the special features of class-rule as they have succeeded one another from epoch to epoch, together with the special character of the struggle between the contending classes. ”

“ But, treating of education or manners, minds of a superior class are not to be considered, they may be left to chance; it is the multitude, with moderate abilities, who call for instruction, and catch the colour of the atmosphere they breathe. ”

“ I hold it to be a matter of the highest importance that there should be a thoroughly civilised class—a class capable of all intellectual pleasures; loving the beauties of art and nature; studying every possible [Pg 130] department of knowledge, scientific and historical; maintaining all such modes of recreation and social enjoyment as are naturally appropriate to such a class. And I do not call any man luxurious for maintaining his position in such a sphere, or for enabling his children to follow in his steps. ”

“ But if this poetry was too exclusively addressed to a class—a class too, though refined by culture, yet living for the most part the life of fashion and pleasure—it had the merit of being the sincere expression of men writing to please themselves and their equals. ”

“ The class called People (to which you and I, with no little pride, attach ourselves) has certain casual, yet profound, assumptions, which are called "commonplaces," as that children are charming, or that twilight is sad and sentimental, or that one man fighting three is a fine sight. ”

“ And this comparison is by no means strained, as I believe it will be found, that each and every class is indeed numerically greater than all the classes higher in social rank—the idlers than the industrious—the workers than the employers—the children than the parents—the illiterate than the instructed—and so on. ”

“ Keep clearly before us the ideal of an Upper-class that is homogeneous. Let us have the man of business as cultured as the professional man, and the professional man as cultured as the man of means. Let us be a true Republic, offering every opportunity to the intelligence of the Lower-class to attain to the culture of the Upper. ”

“ As we glance at these classes we quickly detect that what may be called their vocations are extremely different; that each class—with the exception, perhaps, of two, the professional and the commercial, with that part of the indefinite class which is composed of persons of rank and property, and which approach each other—are as widely separated in tastes and habits and inclinations as they are in labors and works. Looking at the education of body and mind in these classes as a whole, there is certainly little enough of symmetry. ”

“ It is implied that both classes, the children of the world and the children of light, look after their own affairs; and it is intimated that the one class attends to its business more earnestly and more skilfully than the other. ”

“ For every man speaks mainly to a class whom he works with and more or less fully represents. It is to these I am beforehand related and engaged, in this audience or out of it—to them and not to others. And yet, when I say the class of scholars or students,—that is a class which comprises in some sort all mankind, comprises every man in the best hours of his life ”

“ If from the cradle through life the outside world brands a class as unfit for this or that work, the character of the class will come to resemble and conform to the character described. To find valuable qualities in our fellows, such qualities must be presumed and expected. ”

“ They now write books for the working classes, give them lectures, and the like. There is now no class, as a class, more highly educated, broadly educated, and deeply educated, than those who were, in old times, best described as partridge-popping squireens. ”

“ But every class, and every member of a class, should always remember that he may be asked whether, on the whole, he and his like can give any sufficient reason for his or their existence, and that he ought to be prepared with a satisfactory answer. ”

“ They will find in themselves—it must be remembered I am speaking of a class that has naturally segregated, and not of men as a whole—a desire, a passion almost, to create and organize, to put in order, to get the maximum result from certain possibilities. ”

“ the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality. ”

“ Mankind divides itself into two classes,— benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast, the first a handful. ”

“ What classes of things have a greater share of pure existence, in your judgment—those of which food and drink and condiments and all kinds of sustenance are examples, or the class which contains true opinion and knowledge and mind and all the different kinds of virtue? ”

“ And therefore, if those whom we are addressing be consistent, they will exert themselves to do the latter; and, by increasing the knowledge, increase also the power of an extensive and important class,—a class which is as deeply interested as the peerage or the hierarchy in the prosperity and tranquillity of the country ”

“ In every human society of which we have record there has been one class which has done the hard and exhausting work, the "hewers of wood and drawers of water"; and there has been another, much smaller class which has done the directing. ”

“ “Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.” ”

“ At top, a small class, physically and often mentally superb, full of charm, extraordinarily agreeable, fit for great uses, but by temperament, habit and education unequipped for its proper task of equipping and directing the labour out of which ultimately it had to live or perish. ”

“ Of each class a book might be written, yet I may sum up in broad but accurate outline the character of each by saying that it is in the main that of the same class at home. Let me take the middle-class man. ”

“ I have no particular respect for one class more than another, and am especially disposed to indulgence for the faults of those who bear the stress of the labor of the world; but I see that there are classes, and that the fluctuations of fortune, more than any other cause, bring people within the range of influence exercised by the habits of classes, and form them in the mould, so that their virtues and vices afterwards, [Pg 125] besides their smaller qualities and defects, belong to the class they live in and not to the class they may be descended from. ”

“ Some seek the society of their superiors, others of their equals, and others, again, of their inferiors; and the members of each class are actuated in their choice by very various motives. Thus, among the first class are found the ambitious, who seek their superiors because they fancy themselves elevated by the reflection of the attributes they admire; the proud, who fancy themselves degraded by association with their inferiors; and the humble, who seek to be advanced in goodness, in knowledge, or in refinement through intercourse with those who excel. ”

“ If we must select any class, do not let us turn to the wealthy, whom, perhaps, we think of first. They have, in no time that I am aware of, been the pre-eminent rulers of the world. The thinkers and writers, they are the governing class. ”

“ They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. ”

“ This ambitious and exceptionally active class is the class for which the promise of equal opportunities possesses its main significance, and in its relation to which it mainly requires to be examined. ”

“ The other class is composed of those of whom the world knows little; whose perfect seclusion even in a public position has given but little evidence of their abilities, and the world, with its eager curiosity, has been but imperfectly apprised of their merits. Such natures, howsoever cultivated and developed, receive but a small portion of that admiration awarded to the first-mentioned class. ”

“ The progression or emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class: and so it must be here. ”

“ Why should we not do with the middle-class as we have done with the aristocratic class,—find in it some representative men who may stand for the virtuous mean of this class, for the perfection of its present qualities and mode of being, and also for the excess of them. ”

“ One class sees that the other has lighter or at least different labor, opportunities of travel, a more liberal supply of the luxuries of life, a higher enjoyment and a keener relish of the beautiful, the immaterial. ”

“ Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story,—the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper. ”

“ We regret, however, that there is a really worthy class which such a qualification would exclude,––ploughmen, labourers, and country mechanics, who reside permanently in humble cottages, the property of the owner of the soil, and who, though their course through life lies on the bleak edge of poverty, are God-fearing, worthy men, at least morally qualified to give, in the election of a teacher, an honest and not unintelligent voice. ”

“ The class life stands for analysis and special development and establishment; personal life for synthesis and vitality. The factional life of the class is specialistic, and reaps for human nature all the familiar advantages of specialism; the personal life is general or universal, and saves human nature from the disruption and the stagnation to [p.164] which specialism and its formal establishment always tend. The factional life is mediative and instrumental; the personal life is initiative and purposive. ”

“ What is good for the ruling class, is alleged to be good for the whole of society with which the ruling class identifies itself. ”

“ But there are class distinctions, [Pg 20] among the industrious themselves; tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to every degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human power—distinctions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's soul and body. ”

“ The latter class, as a rule, brings to their work no previous education, no theoretical schooling, no technical experience. They come mostly from inferior walks of life, with less intellectual power, and less moral force. ”

“ In this very simple way does the value of our educated class define itself: we more than others should be able to divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye view lets us immediately take our bearings. ”

“ And while so to define the distinction between person and class, or in general to regard their relation as one of whole to part, even with the qualifications that were promptly added, may involve some unavoidable abstraction, and so some limitation of the view ”

“ To realize the importance of the part the poets of this period were destined to play, we must remember what a very small part of the population of this vast country could be called the educated class. ”