Upper-middle class

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Probably the distinguishing mark of the upper-middle class was that its traditions were not to any extent commercial, but mainly military, official, and professional. People in this class owned no land, but they felt that they were landowners in the sight of God and kept up a semi-aristocratic outlook by going into the professions and the fighting services rather than into trade. ”

“ What a splendid field for culture lies in this middle-class that makes a popular poet of Adam Lindsay Gordon! It tempts one to prophesy that, given a higher education for this middle-class, and fifty—forty—thirty years to work it through a generation, and it will leave the English middle-class as far behind in intellect and knowledge as, at the present moment, it is left behind by the middle-class, or rather the one great educated upper-class, of France. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must distinguish between the functions of the classes. The upper class is a remnant of the feudal days, of the manorial times, when land-holding brought with it social distinction and political prerogative. In this sense we have no upper class in America. The middle class is composed of the business and professional element, and the lower class of the wage-earning element.
There are two words, as yet quite unfamiliar to American readers, which are met with constantly in European works on Socialism and are heard on every hand in political discussions—proletariat and bourgeois. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is all the doing of the middle classes, that the veil is thrown over these things. In times when the middle class and the Nonconformist Conscience traditionally lived at Clapham, it mattered comparatively little what excesses were committed; but that class has so increased that it has to be subdivided into Upper and Lower, and has Claphams of its own everywhere. It is—or they are—more wealthy than before, and they read things, you know, and are a power in Parliament, and are something in the dominie sort to those other classes above and below. ”

“ The upper class includes all those who live without work—aristocrats, gamblers, thieves, preachers, women living off men in or out of marriage, grown children living off their parents or off inheritances. All the idlers."
Jane looked almost as uncomfortable as she felt. She had long taken a secret delight in being regarded and spoken of as an "upper class" person. Henceforth this delight would be at least alloyed.
"The middle class," pursued Victor, "is those who are in part parasites and in part workers. The lower class is those who live by what they earn only. ”

“ We may designate the sociological form of a group which is characterized by the extension and prevalence of a middle class as that of continuity. Such a form coexists neither with an actual ungraded equality of individuals throughout the group, nor if the group consists of an upper and a lower class separated from each other by no intervening medium. The middle class, in fact, adds an entirely new sociological element. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Middle Class.—The middle class is not so distinct a stratum of society as are the upper and lower classes. It includes the bulk of the population in the United States, and from its ranks come the teachers, ministers, physicians, lawyers, artists, musicians, authors, and statesmen; the civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers, the architects, and the scientists of every name; most of the tradesmen of the towns and the farmers of the country; office managers and agents, handicraftsmen of the better grade, and not a few of the factory workers. ”

“ Within the middle class further differentiation is made in terms of income and prestige between persons in the upper levels of management and the professions, who have a higher education and those in the lower levels of technical and white-collar employment, who have only a secondary education. The group as a whole probably constitutes almost 20 percent of the population. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Continuity exists only when single individuals circulate through higher and lower positions. Only thus is the separateness of strata changed over into an actually uninterrupted structure. In the fortune of the individuals the upper and the lower situation must first meet, in order that the sociological picture may show an actual mediation between the upper and the lower. Precisely this, and not a simple intermediate position, is secured by a middle class. It requires little reflection to discern that this closeness of gradation must characterize also the grades within the 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their meagre salaries prevent them from dressing as ladies must be dressed for a large company. For the same reason, their boarding-places are obscure and lonely. The middle class of artisans, &c., who send their children to the public schools, seek no intercourse with those whose refinement seems to isolate them; the upper class look down upon them very kindly, but never think of inviting them to meet distinguished people, of showing them rare books or pictures, of stimulating their worn-out faculties in any way. Why do we not make these teachers our first care? ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the upper class, where families are not limited for money reasons; where at least two houses and sometimes three or four are the rule (not to mention the clubs) ; where there is travelling and hotel life; and where the men are brought up, not in the family, but in public schools, universities, and the naval and military services, besides being constantly in social training in other people's houses, the result is to produce what may be called, in comparison with the middle class, something that might almost pass as a different and much more sociable species. ”

“ 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? ”

“ We can even anticipate, from anything that will facilitate fruitful investment by the working-classes, a still wider—we might say, a political effect. The chief defect in our otherwise sound social system, is the want of fusion between the class of employers and employed. As some other countries are subject to the more serious evil of being without a middle-class between the aristocracy and the common people, so we want a sub-grade, as it were, between the middle and the working classes. ”

“ That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all—an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied. ”

“ 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 lower classes, on the other hand, regard the feudal aristocracy as their natural and hereditary enemies, in a political point of view; though personally, I suspect, they like the middle class still less, regarding them as renegades from the common cause of both; and naturally expecting some sympathy from them, are proportionably disgusted at their defection. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The greater part of these schemes aim, though seldom with the consciousness of their promoters, at the creation of a new middle-class out of the wage-earning class, and at their expense, just as the present middle-class was developed out of the serf-population of the early Middle Ages. It may be possible that such a further development of the middle-class lies before us, but it will not be brought about by any such artificial means as the abovementioned schemes. ”

“ When we have done with the Barbarians at the top of the social edifice, and the Middle Class half way up, we come to the Working Class; and of that class the higher portion "looks forward to the happy day when it will sit on thrones with commercial Members of Parliament and other Middle Class potentates; and this portion is naturally akin to the Philistinism just above it. ”