First class

“ The first class includes soldiers, workers in war, and other essential industries, actors, teachers, writers, experts, and Government workers of all sorts. The second class is of all other sorts of workers. The third is of people who do not work—the leisure class. ”

“ For the first class, I doubt if any more effective preparation for life has been devised than that of our best English schools; but the case of the second class is somewhat different. Many of these come to the end of their school time with their intellectual faculties and tastes and their sense of responsibility as men to a great extent undeveloped. ”

“ It may be true that a first class did not always mean a first-class man, but it always seemed to mean a man who had learned how to work honestly, whether he became Prime Minister or Archbishop, or spent his days in one of the public offices, or even in a counting-house or newspaper office. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But then, as a rule, men went into the Schools younger than they do now; there were fewer Schools and fewer first class men; less ardent competition perhaps among private tutors, and on the whole more leisure for continued reading. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Theseus, we are told, divided the people into three classes, irrespective of gentes, on the basis of property and social position. The chiefs of the several gentes with their families, and the citizens who through their great wealth had become influential, constituted the first class ”

“ In the old Ages, when Universities and Schools were first instituted, this function of the schoolmaster, to teach mere speaking, was the natural one. In those healthy times, guided by silent instincts and the monition of Nature, men had from of old been used to teach themselves what it was essential to learn, by the one sure method of learning anything, practical apprenticeship to it. This was the rule for all classes; as it now is the rule, unluckily, for only one class. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ A well-developed man.
We still incline to class distinctions and aristocracies. We incline to the scheme of dividing the world’s work into two classes: first, physical labor, which is held to be rude and vulgar, and the province of a lower class; and second, brain-labor, held to be refined and aristocratic, and the province of a higher class. ”

“ The result of this for us will simply be that the present educated classes and their descendants will become the people; while from among the present people another more highly educated class will arise. ”

“ Rather by instinct than by guidance, he turned to writing, and his professors or tutors occasionally gave his English composition a hesitating approval; but in that branch, as in all the rest, even when he made a long struggle for recognition, he never convinced his teachers that his abilities, at their best, warranted placing him on the rank-list, among the first third of his class. Instructors generally reach a fairly accurate gauge of their scholars' powers. ”

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

“ Everything cries out for the education, for the civilization, of the Upper-class, the ruling class. Educate it, civilize it, let it know what Truth is and what Beauty is, and abolish the bells and the brass-bands for ever! If the Upper-class is beautiful, its beauty will react on the Lower-class. Give us public schools for the Upper-class, as there are public schools for the Lower-class. ”

“ When I have asked Americans what the subtle barriers are that in American society separate class from class, they have replied more than once, “In America there are no classes! We have no differences of rank with us.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The second class, which is designed to assist the poorer nobility, and less opulent among the merchants, citizens, and servants of government, in giving their sons a good general education, consists of sixty pupils, who are received from the age of eleven to fifteen years, and who pay to the Academy twelve florins a month ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have arrived at the conviction that no mere institutions, however wise, and however much thought may have been required to organise and arrange them, can attach class to class as they should be attached, unless the working out of such institutions bring the individuals of the different classes into actual personal contact. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Observing and thinking, for example, have often made, too, separate sub-classes, and also there have been many distinct groups among the workers, such as clerks, soldiers, artisans, road-menders, and tillers of the soil. The simple analysis, however, has been quite enough to show, what has seemed to need emphasis, that all the passions of social life, or rather of social caste, are brought to bear upon the profession of science, giving it the peculiar conceits and advantages of class or caste, and also imposing upon it the peculiar limitations. ”

“ The upper classes had for long been well provided, through tutors in the home and grammar schools and colleges, with those means for education which have for centuries produced an able succession of gentlemen, statesmen, governors, and scholars for England, and many of the commercial middle-class had, by the eighteenth century, become able to purchase similar advantages for their sons. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The labourer's boy as well as the peer's carries the Prime Minister's despatch-box in his satchel. The improvement and popularisation of education, with the institution of suitable bursaries and scholarships, and the gradual breaking-down of class-distinctions, have done much to open a way for the energetic and capable boy. ”

“ Anyone who has seen much of undergraduates, or medical students, or Army candidates, and also of their social subordinates, must be disposed to agree that the difference between the two classes is mainly in unimportant things—in polish, in manner, in superficialities of accent and vocabulary and social habit—and that their minds, in range and power, are very much on a level. With an invincibly aristocratic tradition we are failing altogether to produce a leader class adequate to modern needs. ”

“ For those who were to form the official and directing class of Society—a closely limited, almost entirely male, intellectual aristocracy—education in separate classical schools, with university or professional training superimposed, was provided, and this type of training offered a very thorough preparation for a small and a carefully selected class. ”

“ The best of this class are earnest, liberal, intelligent, brief in discussion, practical and direct in operation, regardless of official honors and the gains connected therewith, and, above all, they know how to master and use wealth, without being in turn mastered by it. ”

“ Thus the educated and intelligent classes send their boys, who, to some extent at least, have inherited their intelligence and ability, to the gymnasium. Those members of the mercantile or artisan class, who have bright boys from whom they hope much, strain every nerve to support them at the school which forms the sole avenue to all government honors and social position. ”

“ The second of these classes has always existed in almost every profession in England; the class, in short, which is convinced that society and the world generally needs reforming, and that it is their little fad which is going to bring about this reformation. ”

“ In the very next 'Atlantic,' you may be sure I shall. The class that do their own work are the strongest, the most numerous, and, taking one thing with another, quite as well cultivated a class as any other. They are the anomaly of our country,—the distinctive feature of the new society that we are building up here; and if we are to accomplish our national destiny, that class must increase rather than diminish. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In other words, the distribution into classes would correspond purely and simply to the telling off of each man to the duties which he is best fitted to discharge. The position into which he is born, the class surroundings which determine his development, must not carry with them any disqualification for his acquiring the necessary aptitude for any other position. ”

“ According to M. Le Bon's researches, the different social classes should be ranked by their cranial capacity as follows: literary and scientific men, middle-class men (bourgeois) , nobles, servants, peasants. The separation of which we speak widens as we rise from the peasant to the man of science, passing the servant, the noble, and the middle-class man. ”

“ The schools are divided into classes, according to the respective studies; that is, into systematic divisions, according to the circumstances of the increasing evolutions of the subjects of study. No age qualifies a child to advance into a higher class, but capacity and acquirement alone. ”

“ The third class, consisting of ninety pupils, from the age of fifteen to twenty years, who are all admitted gratis, is designed to bring forward such youths among the lower classes of the people as show evident signs of UNCOMMON TALENTS and genius, joined to a sound constitution of body, and a good moral character. ”

“ In these cities, schools were opened in which the youth of the middle class were taught eloquence, literature, and philosophy, and trained for official posts, the number of which increased from generation to generation, and for the liberal professions. ”