Middle class

“ Does an idea expand middle class incomes and opportunities? Does it promote values like family and work, responsibility and community? Does it contribute to strengthening the new economy and to building a better future for all of us? ”

“ In each State Civilization produces a middle class, more numerous to-day than the whole peasantry of a thousand years ago. Would Movement and Progress be without their divine uses, even if they limited their effect to the production of such a class? Look also to the effect of art, and refinement, and just laws, in the wealthier and higher classes. See how their very habits of life tend to increase the sum of enjoyment; see the mighty activity that their very luxury, the very frivolity of their pursuits, create! Without an aristocracy, would there have been a middle class? ”

“ Traders and manufacturers took their places somewhat noisily beside their fellow politicians of older standing, filling the whole land till it seems for a moment as if nothing counted any more in English life save its middle class—a busy, hard, prosperous, pugnacious middle-class. ”

“ It is therefore to the middle class, almost exclusively, that we must look for good society; to that class which has not its ideas contracted by laborious occupations, nor its mental powers annihilated by luxury. ”

“ Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foremen, managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers. ”

“ Round about 1890, the middle class having made still more money, having split itself up into upper middle class and lower middle class, having sent its sons to the public schools and universities, its daughters to Brussels or Dresden, began swiftly to slough off the old virtues which it no longer needed. ”

“ The middle class, including the trading, manufacturing, and professional people of our society. It is their ambition and the end of their whole lives to gain, if not for themselves, yet at least for their children, the proud position of being obvious burdens on the community. Here then is another class, this time very numerous and all-powerful, which produces very little and consumes enormously, and is therefore supported, as paupers are, by the real producers. ”

“ The middle class was made up in part of the old servants and clients of the princes, the farmers who rented their lands, the stewards, notaries, and solicitors who managed their fortunes; in part, too, of all the employees, the functionaries of every rank and class, the deputies and senators, whom the new Government had brought from the provinces; and, in particular, of the voracious hawks who had swooped down upon Rome, the Pradas, the men of prey from all parts of the kingdom, who with beak and talon devoured both people and aristocracy. ”

“ The so called middle class are those who neither have great riches nor yet are they in fear of want. The great mass of our people belonged to this class until very recent times. Now we find the excessively rich have multiplied and a vast number of our industrious, honest and virtuous population are struggling for life's necessities. The middle class is less numerous while both those in opulence and those in poverty have been increasing. ”

“ Clear as this is, it will be made clearer still if we take some representative man as the excess of the middle class, and remember that the middle class, in general, is to be conceived as a body swaying between the qualities of its mean and of its excess, and on the whole, of course, as human nature is constituted, inclining rather towards the excess than the mean. ”

“ The poor are inclined to suspect and dislike the classes just above them, the tradesmen. Nowhere is the moral standard more divergent than between the frugal, laborious, and rather timid assiduities of the lower middle class on the one hand, and on the other the reckless, generous, improvident life of the working peoples. ”

“ Between a profligate and servile nobility, and a degraded and enslaved populace, a middle class has lately sprung up; the men of letters, the artists, the professors in the sciences, who have obtained property, or distinction at least, in the commotions which have agitated their country, and those who have served at home or abroad in the revolutionary wars. These all seem impelled by one and the same spirit; and make up for their want of numbers by their activity, talents, enthusiasm, and the secret but increasing influence which they exert over the other classes of society. ”

“ In periods of reaction, when property and commercial activity returned, it was the wealthy who were benefited, while the poor became poorer yet. In this way the middle class had practically disappeared. ”

“ The middle class has everywhere grown with the growth of towns and other places of local exchange, and men have become free precisely as they have been able to unite together for the increase of the productiveness of their labour. ”

“ Now, to begin with the question of historical fact, the effect which has been produced by the large system of production on the distribution of wealth and the general condition of the working class is greatly misconceived by them. So far as the distribution of wealth is concerned, the principal difference that has occurred may be described as the decadence of the lower middle classes, a decline both in the number of persons in proportion to population who enjoy intermediate incomes, and also in the relative amount of the average income they enjoy. ”

“ The present system of social production and private ownership is rapidly converting society into two antagonistic classes—i. e., the capitalist class and the propertyless class. The middle class, once the most powerful of this great nation, is disappearing in the mill of competition. ”

“ The middle class, rich and instructed, obtained an influence which formerly had been monopolised by the noblesse, and aspired to the destruction of privileges which it did not enjoy. Beneath both, the working classes, steeped in misery, crushed under the weight of taxes, reserved to the innovators the most formidable support. ”

“ They clearly saw the complete delusion of the common assertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities, in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are also the centres in which we find the most prosperous middle class, and the highest and most progressive rates [Pg 293] of wages and standards of comfort among the poor. ”

“ Thus it is manifest that the best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class, and that those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large, and stronger if possible than both the other classes, or at any rate than either singly; ”

“ Next below this is a numerous body of the Middle Classes (bourgeoisie) , consisting of two distinct sets; the one, the active class, is engaged in commerce, manufactures, agriculture, and the liberal professions; the other, generally designated amongst us as the bourgeoisie oisive, consists of men without active employment, landholders who derive an income of 500 or 1500 dollars from their estates, by rents or sharing the produce with the cultivator, without attempting to increase it, and the small body of holders of public stock. ”

“ The distribution of surplus wealth among the middle classes has proved an entire failure in national economics.
Now, lastly, the surplus is passing into a new class, the large business speculator, the financier, and trust-man. So far as we can yet see, this class is justifying itself far more than the middle class. In fifty years the middle classes have not given as much to endow education as the millionaires have given in five years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is little scope for the salary-earning middle class—a most valuable class in all communities—and, though wages are high according to European standards, the advance is not so great when the heavy cost of living is borne in mind. ”

“ Of the total number of persons engaged in occupations in the United States, only nine-tenths of one per cent are from the Plutocracy, yet the Plutocracy owns seventy per cent of the total wealth. The middle class owns twenty-four billions. Twenty-nine per cent of those in occupations are from the middle class, and they own twenty-five per cent of the total wealth. Remains the proletariat. It owns four billions. Of all persons in occupations, seventy per cent come from the proletariat; and the proletariat owns four per cent of the total wealth. Where does the power lie, gentlemen? ”

“ The middle class is declining, and society becoming slowly an aggregation of capitalists and employers, an unhealthy social condition, premonitory of struggles and conflicts that were not possible fifty years ago. ”

“ It is the tendency of all social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force the society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme. ”

“ The English middle class, which had taken form in the fourteenth century, was well established in the fifteenth century, when it became so important as to be an appreciable factor in the national life. The middle class arose through currency, the use of money to bring in more money by trading. Trade became the monopoly of the middle class, the successful master-traders. It was men of this class, the capitalist employers, the merchants and traders who were the mayors and aldermen, who ruled the city. ”

“ Now the rich can take care of themselves and the very poor and unfortunate cannot be permanently helped, but this great middle class, upon whom the nation must depend in every crisis, can and must be assisted to the extent, at least, that conditions be made possible through which they may raise their efficiency and so increase their earning capacity to a point commensurate with their needs. ”

“ It has often been remarked that in no other country in Europe is there a middle class corresponding to the middle class in England. In no other country is the middle class such a powerful factor in national life. ”

“ In modern times the great phenomenon has been the growth of the middle class out of the mediaeval cities, the accumulation of wealth, and the encroachment of wealth, as a social power, on the ground formerly occupied by rank and birth. ”

“ The upper middle class is the backbone of a nation, supplying its thinkers, leaders, and organizers. This class is not a mushroom growth, but the result of a long process of selecting the abler and fitter members of society. ”

“ Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit. ”

“ And I think I should note that when I talk about the middle class, I'm talking about folks who are currently on the middle class, but also people who aspire to be in the middle class. We're not forgetting the poor. They are going to be front and center, because they, too, share our American Dream. And we're going to make sure that they can get a piece of that American Dream if they're willing to work for it. ”

“ House rent, and the rates laid upon house rent, clothes, food, the demands for small enjoyments, with the debt which often accompanies a too radiant conception of the possibilities of fixed income, leave little margin for superfluous expenditure. And as with the body, so with the soul. Considerable hours spent in not too exacting but conspicuously cheerless occupations, the natural harassments of Middle Class poverty, and the misfortune of loss or sickness, which is always unexpected and generally unprovided for, leave little surplusage of mental energy to be devoted to larger issues. ”

“ As I have said, it is impossible for them to coalesce with the middle classes to produce the universal reign of moderate bourgeois society which some have dreamed of; because however many of them may rise out of their class, these become at once part of the middle class, owners of capital, even though it be in a small way, and exploiters of labour; and there is still left behind a lower class which in its own turn drags down to it the unsuccessful in the struggle ”

“ One hears this argument most frequently from the representatives of the well-to-do middle class; and, coming from them, it strikes me as peculiarly inconsistent, as the one thing they admire, strive after, and advise their own children to do, is to get on in the world, and, if possible, rise out of the class in which they were born into that above them. Society needs grocers and merchants as much as it needs coalheavers ”

“ THE MIDDLE CLASS The middle class included professional men, shopkeepers independent farmers, and skilled craftsmen. Though regarded as inferiors, still they had a chance to rise in the world. If they became rich, they might hope to enter the upper class as priests or government officials.
WORKMEN AND PEASANTS No such hopes encouraged the day laborer in the fields or shops. His lot was bitter poverty and a life of unending toil. If he was an unskilled workman, his wages were only enough to keep him and his family. ”

“ The lower middle-classes, the small manufacturers, the shop keepers, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle-class ... ”

“ A great proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to the unemployed and the unemployable." And that is the moral we may lay to heart from the presentation of these three quite lovable and quite futile draper's assistants. ”