Wealthy class

“ Greed, false economy and heartless indifference to the welfare of others are unfortunately too prevalent among the wealthy class. No ordinary argument could induce owners to expend money in strengthening or rebuilding their income-producing properties. But I get after them in my picture with a prod that ought to rouse them to action. ”

“ The rich class of the modern world have, as a whole, become rich in the second way.
◆1 The natural causes that tend to distribute amongst Labour a large portion of the wealth produced by Ability will be best understood if we first consider for a moment the two ways—and the two only ways—in which a minority can become wealthy. ”

“ He was the idol of the middle class; bankers, merchants, lawyers, and wealthy shopkeepers were his strongest supporters. All classes acquiesced in the rule of a worthy man, as he seemed to all,--moderate, peace-loving, benignant, good-natured. ”

“ First comes the Plutocracy, which is composed of wealthy bankers, railway magnates, corporation directors, and trust magnates. Second, is the middle class, your class, gentlemen, which is composed of farmers, merchants, small manufacturers, and professional men. And third and last comes my class, the proletariat, which is composed of the wage-workers. ”

“ Then, too, the majority of the millionaires with us, and, perhaps, in England and France, began life as workmen, or, at least, without capital and with very little credit.
It is not easy to say precisely what the special grievances of the workingmen are, at least in our country, since comparatively few of the wealthy or easy classes of to-day inherited their wealth, or had to start with any appreciable advantages, pecuniary, educational, or social, over their compeers who have remained in the proletarian class. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They believe that wealth is a power which can raise the wealthy few to the dominancy of a privileged class. They believe that as members of this class, they can treat all other classes as servitors and dependents, who may be hired to do [Pg 396] anything for money. They view with complacency, the crowded populations of our great cities. The greater and more dense the mass of people, the larger, more dependent and more obsequious the class of servitors. ”

“ If I had contented myself with spending my income only, then, instead of devoting ourselves to some useful employment, we should probably have led idle, aimless lives; instead of living frugally, we should have indulged in luxuries and more or less vain display; in short, we should have led such a life as nearly all wealthy people of the middle class lead. ”

“ A wealthy middle class, closely connected with the nobility (by the usual process of the rich banker’s daughter marrying the poor baron’s son) and a court composed of all the most entertaining people of France, had brought the polite art of graceful living to its highest development. As the best brains of the country were not allowed to occupy themselves with questions of political economics, they spent their idle hours upon the discussion of abstract ideas. ”

“ An entirely new class appeared in society. The employers of labour were added to the other elements of the middle class, the merchants and shipowners, the barristers and doctors, and the better sort of clergy and attorneys. The new class, larger and more wealthy than any of the others, was dominated by no traditions, either for good or evil, and it depended for its existence and growth upon qualities of enterprise and adaptability, which territorial wealth neither required from {74}nor fostered in its owners. ”

“ Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are [378] enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families. They are not driven to the ultimate resources of dexterity and skill, because their wares will sell although not quite so nice as those of England. The wealthy, on the other hand, and those at their ease, know nothing of what the Europeans call luxury. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We recognize three distinct grades among us; namely, the wealthy or those who have acquired money, supporting their families in the style that aristocratic Americans do; the working class including those engaged in business, professors, tradesmen, and the daily laborers ”

“ The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select; of an educated class; of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained. The bad [Pg 333] time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. ”

“ With money and property comes the means of knowledge and power. A poverty-stricken class will be an ignorant and despised class, and no amount of sentiment can make it otherwise. This part of our destiny is in our own hands. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although its ideal was money, and although it set up the acquisition of wealth as the all-stimulating incentive and goal of human effort, it viewed sullenly and enviously the development of an established magnate class which could look haughtily and dictatorially down upon it even as it constantly looked down upon the working class. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Now, there is nothing more false than such a distinction, for, among those called rich, there are many that are poor, and wealth and poverty are not generally absolutely different. It depends on the relations between the wants and the means of satisfying them.
How many among physicians, lawyers, artists, for example—among men who belong to what we call the middle class—are, I ask, not only poor, but wretched? How are we to know them? What is it marks in society the rich and the poor? ”

“ For, since wealth is power, the leading class is necessarily dominated by those who profit or imagine they profit by injustice in the distribution of wealth. ”

“ What is eloquently described as "the progress of civilization," as "material prosperity," and "unexampled wealth," or, more modestly, as "the rise of the industrial middle class," becomes, when we look into it with eyes purged from economic delusions, the creation of a "lower and lowest" class, without land of their own, without homes, tools or property beyond the strength of their hands; whose lot is more helplessly wretched than any poet of the Inferno has yet imagined. ”

“ It seems as if it were a mere struggle between the nobility and the mobility, and the middle-class—that vast body of good sense, education, and wealth, and efficient to hold the beam even between the scales—throws itself man by man into one or the other of them, and so only swells the adverse parties on each side. ”

“ However, men may, in reference to this matter, be divided into three classes. The first acts on society mainly by their capital; the second mainly by their skill, mental and manual, by educated labor; and the third by their muscles, by brute force with little or no skill, uneducated labor. The poor, I take it, come mainly from this latter class. Education of head or hand, a profession or a trade, is wealth in possibility; yes, wealth in prospect, wealth in its process of accumulation, for wealth itself is only accumulated labor, as learning is accumulated thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But for a few thousand poor ignorant field-hands, in the face of poverty, a falling market, and social stress, to save and capitalize two hundred thousand dollars in a generation has meant a tremendous effort. The rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate. ”

“ But distinct from this class—among whom may be counted some of the noblest examples of life—there is the class of degraded poor. Here the want is not so much a want of money (some of the trades, such as hawking, flower-selling, shoe-blacking, occasionally bringing in as much as from ten to twenty shillings a day) as the want of the common virtues of ordinary life. ”

“ Now concerning this unknown class whose oppression we deplore we have two sources of information: the financiers who, for their own material advancement, use the labourer as a means, and the philanthropists who consider the poor as objects of charity, to be treated sentimentally, or as economic cases to be studied theoretically. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But wealth can be created only by laboring; wealth is nothing but the proceeds of labor.
Therefore,
To have comfort, in the lady and gentleman sense, in the sense in which our new luxury-mad upper class is determined to have it, means that one must “appropriate”—that is, steal—the proceeds of the labor of others.
First corollary: That the more “comfortable” the upper class becomes, the more of the proceeds of the labor of others it must be stealing. ”

“ Socially, the influence of nobles and clergy steadily declined. As steadily arose the numbers, the ability, and the importance of the traders and commercial magnates, the moneyed people, all those who were identified with the new wealth that the Commercial Revolution was creating, the lawyers, the doctors, the professors, the merchants,—the so-called middle class, the bourgeoisie, who gradually grew discontented with the restrictive institutions of their time. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the accumulation of riches, and consequently of an excessive purchasing power, in the hands of a class, soon satiates that class with socially useful wealth, and sets them offering a price for luxuries. The moment a price is to be had for a luxury, it acquires exchange [19] value, and labor is employed to produce it. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ And we see these few rising as if by magic into power and affluence, and forming, with the millionaires who have accidentally gained huge riches by the occasional windfalls of our commerce, the governing class. Now nothing is more disastrous than a governing class that does not know how to govern. ”

“ 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. ”