Third class

“ Tiers état, or third class, is what the middle class in France was called, because they formed, in contrast to the two privileged classes, the nobility and the clergy, a third class, which meant all the people without privilege. ”

“ 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. ”

“ However that may be, it is absolutely against the rules of the game for any doughboy to ride third class if there are any second class coaches, and equally disgraceful to ride second class if there is a first. I myself have seen an American buck private with third class transportation in his pocket stretching his legs in a luxurious first class compartment seat, while a French general stood up outside in the corridor! ”

“ At this point, the question arises: How shall they be improved? One element says, Improve them, but only as laborers, for which alone they are fitted; another, with a larger charity, says, Enlarge this and give them a chance to become good mechanics, as they have shown themselves capable of improvement in the industrial field; a third class goes further yet, and says, Give them a yet further chance—a chance to develop themselves; enlighten them and teach them the duties of citizenship and they will become measurably good citizens. ”

“ Palmer’s name did occur in the Classical Tripos—but alas! in the third class. Was it possible, was it probable, that a third-class man could be a person worthy of consideration at all? Third-class men are good enough for assistant-masters in small schools, for curacies, or for any other branch of labour which can be performed without much intellect. But a third-class man must never, under any circumstances, consider that he has a right to learn anything or to claim distinction as a scholar. ”

“ The division is an ancient one, and is the basis of our social life. The Third Class, which is the most numerous, is sometimes also called the Hungry Class; its members are notable for doing most of the country's hard work, and for being so poor that they rarely have enough to eat. ”

“ The third class consists of those who, by their pre-eminent abilities and learning, attract the regard of the unlearned, are taken by these into their families, married to their daughters, and maintained for some years with wife and children at their expense. ”

“ Well, where there's a politician, there's a way—as the ancient saying goes. The law, to be sure, distinctly says that no Third Class citizen may ever become Second Class; but we'll get around that by proving to the courts that you really were Second Class all along. ”

“ You know that on this steamer there is only a first-class and a third-class, and they only allow peasants—that is the rift-raft—to go in the third. If you have got on a reefer jacket and have the faintest resemblance to a gentleman or a bourgeois you must go first-class, if you please. You must fork out five hundred roubles if you die for it. Why, I ask, have you made such a rule? Do you want to raise the prestige of educated Russians thereby? Not a bit of it. We don’t let you go third-class simply because a decent person can’t go third-class ”

“ This class is at present largely composed of persons who have risen from the lowest of the classes, and any future change by which the third class becomes smaller and the second larger would doubtless retard the average birth rate of the whole society. ”

“ The third class do not seem to have any particular dislike to it. When the Commissioner asked me at Brae if I had known men lose their independence by coming in debt, or something like that, I had this class in my mind, and I was puzzled what to say. ”

“ It is a known fact that the third class traffic pays for the ever-increasing luxuries of first and second class travelling. Surely a third class passenger is entitled at least to the bare necessities of life. ”

“ It is not uncommon in the one-room school for the teacher to regard these differences in ability in particular subjects as adequate reasons for distributing the pupils differently in different subjects. It comes about in the course of time that one and the same pupil will be in the third reading class, in the fourth geography class, and in the fifth or sixth class in arithmetic, while another pupil who has attained to the fifth reader will be lingering behind in the third class in arithmetic. ”

“ Further, the schools should be divided into two classes at least: the first would be suitable for the sons of the higher kind of tradesmen, professional men, and gentlemen of limited means; the second for the children of quite small tradesmen or even hucksters. These latter are a very important class, perhaps the most important; and with a little diligence and management might be picked up by thousands. ”

“ Of course, this classification is made without reference to social 'classes.' The public is recruited from the upper, the middle, and the lower class. That the recruits come mostly from the lower class is because the lower class is still the least well-educated. ”

“ 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 ”

“ This class is called the upper middle-class, and it does not go to the Council Schools because it has money to go elsewhere. The children of this class are, in brain and heart, not superior to the children of what are called the working classes. ”

“ Among the middle classes, the gradations and varieties of social position are more numerous, less distinctly marked, and therefore fenced round with a world of form and ceremony. And as we descend, and enter the lower ranks, and approach the lowest, the distinctions and grades multiply. ”

“ The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the chances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

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

“ The equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture which all persons now enjoy have simply made us all members of one class, which corresponds to the most fortunate class with you. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks. ”

“ The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. ”

“ Consequently, Nature herself supplies us with an ascending scale or Alphabet of angles for half a degree up to 60 degrees, Specimens of which are placed in every Elementary School throughout the land. Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees. These are absolutely destitute of civic rights; ”

“ 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; ”

“ “I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class.” ”

“ About a century ago, after, the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic wars, the present industrial era opened, and brought with it a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers. ”

“ But all great men come out of the middle classes. ”

“ 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. ”

“ “What’s the matter?” asked the teacher, seeing her bewildered face.
“Why—why,” said Elizabeth Ann, “I don’t know what I am at all. If I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading and third-grade spelling, what grade am I?”
The teacher laughed at the turn of her phrase. “you aren’t any grade at all, no matter where you are in school. You’re just yourself, aren’t you? What difference does it make what grade you’re in! And what’s the use of your reading little baby things too easy for you just because you don’t know your multiplication table?” ”

“ or, in other words, that the great inequality of classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality, that this constitution of things, I say, has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class. ”

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

“ People are divided into two classes—those who profit by experience and those who do not. The unfortunate part of it all is that the latter class is by far the larger of the two. ”

“ It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. [1] I do not mean that the9 condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. ”

“ But that vast portion, lastly, of the working class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes,—to this vast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace. ”

“ There can be no doubt of this: All America is divided into two classes,—the quality and the equality. ”

“ We know Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired labourers amongst us. How little they know whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired labourers amongst us. Twenty-five years ago I was a hired labourer. The hired labourer of yesterday labours on his own account to-day, and will hire others to labour for him to-morrow.
Advancement—improvement in condition—is the order of things in a society of equals. ”

“ There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. ”

“ Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune, [4] here independent urban republic ”

“ In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. ”

“ The society of persons engaged in the pursuits of literature, including the officers and students. Societies of this kind are incorporated, and endowed with revenues.
"A college, in the modern sense of that word, was an institution which arose within a university, probably within that of Paris or of Oxford first, being intended either as a kind of boarding-school, or for the support of scholars destitute of means, who were here to live under particular supervision. ”