Upper class

“ This new upper class will immediately recognize each other on the street because they will look entirely different than the short-lived poorer folk and will probably run the political economic system. ”

“ The upper class reflect the days of feudalism, of governmental prerogative and aristocracy. The middle class are the representatives of the guild and mercantile systems, when hand labor and later business acumen brought power and wealth to the craftsman and adventurer. The lower class are the homologues of the slaves, the serfs, the toilers, whose reward has constantly been measured by the standard of bare existence. Socialism arises consciously out of the efforts of this class to win for itself a share of the powers of the other classes. ”

“ At that point in human history a ruling class began to flatter themselves and talk in a loud and handsome manner about “the best people,” “the right to ride inferior people,” “the progressive, enterprising part of society,” and so forth. The “leading citizens” knew very well that they had a “good thing”—for the “leading citizens,” for the upper class who thus became so very pleasantly located as an upper class—that is, upon the industrial shoulders of the “lower class,” the working class. ”

“ Revolt, sullen, revengeful humour of revolt against the upper classes, decreasing respect for what their temporal superiors command, decreasing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and more the universal spirit of the lower classes. ”

“ But, as a rule, to speak frankly, I find that people of what I must call the lower class are not interested in these things; people in what I will call the upper class are faintly interested, in a horrible and condescending way, in them—which is worse than no interest at all. ”

“ They had all the pride and social tastes of the upper class but not its wealth. Then came the 'pretenders,' men of industry and enterprise but not of established families, ...Below these classes were the 'yeomen,' most of whom were very poor. ”

“ The immense gains that have come to society through philanthropy and social organization, as well as through the channels of industry, would have been impossible without the sympathetic activity of the so-called upper class. ”

“ Afterwards, while this upper class grows distinct from the lower, and at the same time becomes more and more exclusively regulative and defensive in its functions, alike in the persons of kings and subordinate rulers, priests, and soldiers; the inferior class becomes more and more exclusively occupied in providing the necessaries of life for the community at large. ”

“ The rising standard of life of the upper class oozes down through to those beneath and wakens in them new needs and demands to the satisfaction of which the slowly growing wage is by no means satisfactory. ”

“ I have already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and more the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all their grades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of the State, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lower class, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated inadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development of toil-saving machinery, dwindling and crumbling down bit by bit towards the abyss. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We staggered under the load of a wealthy and titled upper class. They consumed the people’s time and imposed infinite misery on some millions of toilers, and for these things we rewarded the men at the top with fresh titles. ”

“ In the memoirs of the last century you will find continually a kind of disgust expressed by the upper class against a set just below them; it is the class feeling against the bourgeoisie, their choice of words, their restrictions of fortune, their unfashionable virtues. These men were often learned; among the lawyers they were the pick of France ”

“ The worst of it all appears to me to be that the increase of wealth in the upper class is exterminating the home idea, to which I cling, single woman as I am; and consequently the middle classes, as blind copyists, also are tending to throw it over. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Can any form of cruelty surpass this? Yet this reckless course is pursued to a large extent among every class. The middle and upper classes are equally guilty with the lower class. They live beyond their means. They live extravagantly. ”

“ Every man who held land under these conditions—and it was impossible to hold land without them—was of the upper class. He was nobilis or known, and of a rank distinct, apart, and absolutely separate from the remainder of the population, who were at one time actually serfs, and for long enough afterwards, of no higher social position than they had enjoyed in their period of servitude. ”

“ Our secondary education, he said, is a chaos. He pointed out that the bulk of the middle class of this country were worse educated than the corresponding class either in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, or the United States; the reason being, he explained, that our upper class do not want to be disturbed in their preponderance, or the middle class in their vulgarity. ”

“ Since the Industrial Revolution and rise of the press, the middle-class has become more and more the real law-maker. The poor have voted legislators into power; the upper class in the main has formally made the laws; but the engineering of legislation has been, and is, the work of the middle class. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Worth of the Upper Class.—It is a common belief among the lowly that the people who hold a place in the upper ranks are not worthy of their lofty position, and there are many who hope to see such a general levelling as took place during the French Revolution. They are fortified in their opinion by the lavish and irresponsible way in which the wealthy use their money, and they are tantalized by the display of luxury which, if times are hard, are in aggravating contrast to the hardship and suffering of the poor. ”

“ As it is, the attempt has long been made in name, but, as a matter of fact, we have humbled the upper class, and failed to raise a middle class to take its place. We have crushed the prince without setting up the trader in his stead. ”

“ Those addressed are the wealthy and powerful upper class, whose luxury and wanton extravagance had consumed the resources of the country, and left no sustenance for the poorer members of the community. ”

“ These people have not the means to make large display. They are influenced by the fashions of the upper class, sometimes are induced to applaud their poses or are hypnotized to do their bidding, but they have their own class standards, and most of them are contented to occupy their modest station. Only a minority of them own their homes, but as a class they can afford to pay a reasonable rent and to furnish their houses tastefully, to hire one or two household servants, and to live in comfort. ”

“ The upper class were further back than those of Europe in the seventeenth century,572 for few of them had received any sort of higher education and none of them had any personal knowledge of free institutions, or any experience in civil administration. ”

“ It represents not only the wealth and independence, but the capacity and the morality of a people. Between the aristocracy, which boasts of doing nothing, and the lower orders who only work that they may not die of hunger, the middle class advances boldly to a future of wealth and consideration. Sometimes the upper class is hostile to progress, through fear of its results ”

“ They may be upper, that is, ahead in shameless dishonesty, in gilded fashion, deceptive force, in skillful lying, willful seduction and foul unchastity. If that is the meaning of the term, I accept it, but the real 160genuine upper class of the world is what are called the common people. ”

“ One hears, indeed, of numbers of dainty people, who are sometimes spoken of as “the upper classes” in American society, affecting to hold aloof from political life and taking no part in the strife of parties. ”

“ And however charming one may be, one's bones are not fit for public inspection. Also the papers would put the name of one of the guests with dashes for vowels, and the excited reader would draw his conclusions. Really, the upper class is terribly ill-used. It is the whipping-boy of the nation. ”

“ Generally speaking, one may say, that while our upper and lower classes are, if anything, rather worse in their morals than in England, we make up for the deficiency by a decided superiority amongst the middle--both upper-middle and lower-middle--class. ”

“ 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 upper middle-class, which on the continent is entirely with the people, the professional and mercantile class, is here entirely conservative, and without that class no great changes can ever be made. ”

“ The nobility or upper set, and the lower class of Englishmen, are dissolute and immoral to an extreme, while the middle class is perfection. In this class one will find the moral, refined, upright, and honest Englishmen, and no where in the world can be found a better class of men and women than in this middle class. ”

“ 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. ”

“ From the peasantry, as from other sections of the lower middle class, only an insignificant minority "rise to the top," and "enter society," make a career in a bourgeois sense, that is, become transformed either into propertied members of the upper middle class, or into secure and privileged officials. ”

“ Those who attained individualisation in the seventh round of the moon-chain. The members of this class do not differ greatly from those of the last, except that they are somewhat nearer the average in goodness or intellectual development or religious feeling. They turn their intelligence to rather more material ends, as city merchants perhaps. They represent the great division which we commonly call the upper middle class — gentlemen still, yet with a life slightly less elevated than that of the professional man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Before such a change can take place, the upper classes of society must again degenerate into a state of absolute idleness, so as to have no other occupation than licentiousness; the spirit of industry, which now animates and elevates the minds of people in the middle ranks, must be destroyed; and finally, the lower classes must be again plunged into that state of subjection and degradation which once reduced them to the level of mere beasts of burden. ”

“ Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also always be. ”

“ Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity and there is pestilential 164 air at the bottom of it. ”

“ It is really only in a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a café. The upper classes are too refined, and the lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished with entertainments of their own ”

“ Almost all the signs which, according to the above paragraphs, distinguish a higher stage of civilization from a lower, may be shown within the limits of the same age and nation to characterize the upper classes as compared with the lower. ”

“ Thus the middle class is constantly recruited from the upper. Besides, the upper is all the time recruited from the wealthy middle; the union of aristocracy and plutocracy may be said to be complete. But merit makes its way continually from even the lower ranks upward, in the professions, in the army, the law, the church, in letters, in trade, and, what Mr. ”