Servant class

“ For this reason, the servant-class will always be a great source of danger to our present social condition; seeing the weakness, the folly, and sometimes the worse than folly of those they serve, viewing, from a near point, the interior lives of those who, seen from afar, are reckoned great and illustrious,—they lose the prestige of respect for the distinguishing qualities of station, and only yield it to the outward symbols,—the wealth and riches. What Socialists are our butlers ”

“ All English literature of the world describes domestic service in the old feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an inferior one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So there is no exclusive, permanent servile class—none that does all the work, and enjoys none of the results: there is no exclusive and permanent ruling class; all are masters, all servants; all command, and all obey. ”

“ The supposition that hired servants were the highest class, takes from the parable an element of winning beauty and pathos. It is manifest to every careful student of the Bible, that one class of servants, was on terms of equality with the children and other members of the family. ”

“ The supreme Lord of the universe has, in his wisdom, rendered the various conditions of mankind necessary to our individual happiness:—some are rich, others poor—some are masters, and others servants.—Subordination, indeed, attaches to your rank in life, but not disgrace. All men are servants in different degrees. The nobles and ministers of state are subservient to the king, and the king himself is the servant of the nation, and is wisely submissive to its laws. It manifests a divine superintendance, that civil society should thus be composed of subordinate and superior classes. ”

“ The classes consist of princes, nobles, priests, military men, professional or learned ones, merchants, and, lastly, artisans, or labourers. Occasionally, through wealth or merit, individuals are advanced to the class above that in which they are born; but to descend into an inferior one, is to forfeit claim to respectability. ”

“ I never have had a clearer light thrown on the curious and disgusting manners of the lower middle-class in England—the class that prides itself especially on its respectability, above all, on what it calls 'Morality'—by which it means the observance of one particular commandment. ”

“ Let us work for the day when we can get along without servants; when life shall be so simple that each family can do its own work. The servant system is but little different from the slave system, and it ought to be abolished. ”

“ They give the supreme direction to social action, make the supreme law of the social constitution. The second class are their instruments for governing. They are the warders of justice, the guardians of order and security, the higher ranks of soldiers, above all the king as the highest formula of soldier, judge, and maintainer of the law. They take from the first class all that is gross and rude (grob) in the work of ruling—are their attendants, their right hand, their best pupils. ”

“ The characteristic and pervasive human relation in such a culture is that of master and servant, and the social (domestic and civil) structure is an organisation of graded servitude, in which no one is his own master but the overlord, even nominally. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are different divisions of human activity, and it is quite natural that those individuals whose temperament calls them to a certain activity—literary or religious or mercantile or military or what not—should range themselves together in a caste or class; just as the different functions of the human body range themselves in definite organs. And such grouping in classes may be perfectly healthy provided the class so created subordinates itself to the welfare of the Nation. ”

“ Far behind his class come the rank and file of commonplace drudges, who work in a rut and submit to being led like sheep. They may be clerks, domestic servants, trade union operatives, pensioners, or small investors. They form the large, undistinguished, but useful mass of humanity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We believe it would attain a much higher position, and that those who wield its powers would be infinitely more respected as a class, and an important one, if it were purged of a disposition to sordid attacks upon itself, which only prevails in England and America. ”

“ Classes of Society.—The classes of people were the freemen of noble blood, or the nobility, the common freemen, the freedmen, or half-free, and the slaves.
The class of the nobility was based largely upon ancient lineage, some of whom could trace their ancestry to such a distance that they made tenable the claim that they were descended from the gods. The position of a noble was so important in the community that he found no difficulty in making good his claim to pure blood and a title of reverence, but this in no way gave him any especial political privilege. ”

“ This intense and all-pervading devotion to one pursuit, and that a pursuit to which the existence of a servile class is declared essential, must, in a republic more than in any other government, produce certain marked politico-philosophical and economical effects on the master-class as a whole. ”

“ They have worked that out with absolute justice. But there it stops. The serving class is what we should call abject. It does not occur to them that they might ever become—or that their descendants might ever become—ladies and gentlemen. ”

“ There is not, after all, such a difference as might appear between our ways of looking at this question of service. Ladies and gentlemen of the cultured class in your day would no more have permitted persons of their own class to render them services they would scorn to return than we would permit anybody to do so. The poor and the uncultured, however, they looked upon as of another kind from themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But it could not so well dispense with a class such as we refer to, if it was to become a country to which men of character and position would not hesitate to resort. A class was wanted other than the emancipists—the very worst that could have been chosen—to supply persons of standing, acquirements, and, above all, of reputable experience for the magistracy, and for other national, so to speak, as well as local, offices of trust and administration. ”

“ And that, as a class, they do so act, we have the testimony of the noble Earl who, with princely munificence, generous sympathy, and statesmanlike intelligence, heads the movement for the relief of the distress. All classes, both high and low, are nobly doing their duty. The patient endurance of the suffering working-classes is heroic; the lively sympathy and active co-operation of the other classes of the community on their behalf are without a parallel. ”

“ Ceasing by-and-by to have any knowledge of, or power over, the concerns of the society as a whole, the serf-class becomes devoted to the processes of alimentation; while the noble class, ceasing to take any part in the processes of 406 alimentation, becomes devoted to the co-ordinated movements of the entire body politic. ”

“ And in each civilization we find a dominant class imposing its will upon the balance of society and maintaining the basic method of wealth production and distribution of that time. All the laws, the religion, the educational system or lack of educational system were designed to retain that class in its position of power and privilege. ”

“ Still, to make it perfectly manifest that no more in the working-class than in the aristocratic and middle classes can one find an adequate centre of authority,—that is, as culture teaches us to conceive our required authority, of light,—let us again follow, with this class, the method we have [86] followed with the aristocratic and middle classes, and try to bring before our minds representative men, who may figure to us its virtue and its excess. ”

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

“ The morals of the lords and ladies of the upper strata of the aristocratic class were of no higher grade; the offenders, however, were seldom the priests, but the gallants of that privileged circle. The lower rank of the aristocracy,—the knights and lesser landholders,—which, with the decline of feudalism, came to be more strongly defined as a separate class, appears to have preserved the best moral tone of any of the classes of mediæval society. ”

“ American men will never recognize one kind of training for a superior social class, and another for an inferior. The training-school for servants means the introduction of a caste system utterly at variance with democratic ideas. ”

“ The master may remain master, and the servant a servant; but, according to the constitution of the state they have entered, the service must be a voluntary one on the part of the slave, and the master must render a just equivalent. ”

“ PATRIOTISM AT A SAFE DISTANCE. But, while lustily indulging in patriotic palaver, the propertied classes took excellent care that their own bodies should not be imperilled. Inspired by enthusiasm or principle, a great array of the working class, including the farming and the professional elements, volunteered for military service. ”

“ Better than any work, avowedly on history, it graphically traces the special features of the several systems of class-rule as they succeeded each other from epoch to epoch, together with the nature of the struggle between the contending classes. ”

“ Individual exceptions are, of course, to be found in all classes, but there is, after all, a more or less consistent, prevalent class attitude. As is well known, clergymen, lawyers, soldiers, civil servants, and the like, are popularly held to be of a conservative, if not reactionary temper. ”

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

“ 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. ”

“ And then the relations of these three governing elements to the entire community may, and ordinarily do, undergo change by the formation of a passive class, excluded from their deliberations—a class at first composed of the women and afterward containing also the slaves or other dependents. ”

“ This large Class feels the oppression of its daily toil; it sees that the Higher Classes in their copious and comfortable enjoyment of life do not participate in its mechanical labours:—but how these have also their labours and toils in other spheres, how they are useful and necessary for the general welfare, and even indispensable for the People themselves ”

“ These and other measures, and other occurrences, were making way for a new class of society to emerge, and show itself, in a military and feudal age; a middle class, between the barons or great landholders and the retainers of the crown, on the one side, and the tenants of the crown and barons, and agricultural and other laborers, on the other side. ”

“ Turning now from peers, legislators, judges, and bishops,--the men who composed the governing class,--all equally aristocratic and exclusive, let us with our traveller survey the middle class, who were neither rich nor poor, living by trade, chiefly shopkeepers, with a sprinkling of dissenting ministers, solicitors, surgeons, and manufacturers. ”

“ In all phases of material civilisation these preferential advantages are sought and valued. Classes or groups which are in a position to make good a claim to such differential advantages commonly come, in due course, to put forward such claims; as, e.g., the priesthood, the princely and ruling class, the men as contrasted with the women, the adults as against minors, the able-bodied as against the infirm. ”