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He was charmed beyond expression by his journey through the manufacturing districts of Gloucestershire, more particularly by the fine scenery of the Vale of Stroud. The whole seemed to him a smiling scene of prosperous industry and middle-class comfort. But passing out of this "Paradise," as he styled it, another stage brought him into a region the very opposite.
Of course there were two or three brides, and there was the inevitable English nice middle-class tourist with his wife, the latter ram-roddy and uncompromising, in big boots and botanical, who, in response to a gentleman who was giving her information about travel, constantly ejaculated, in broad English, "Yas, yas; ow, ow, ow, really!"
Here the Court is merely one big middle-class family, where a prayer is said before meat, where the parents must always be the first to speak, where strictest obedience must, if necessary, tolerate even absurdities; where one quarrels, out of one's mutual affection, sometimes where we even torture one another and make life harder for one another all out of love
Or opportunities more equal for all, without a complete equalization, may merely increase the competition of the lower classes for middle-class positions and so secure to the capitalists cheaper professional service.
But, despite the general desire for economy, it is certain that from that time on the middle-class folk at all events began to wear better clothes and buy better commodities generally articles which lasted longer, and were better worth using. The reason of this was all a part of the same teaching, the same general tendency.
What happy times for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers when, instead of working, they could go in processions, bearing aloft the insignia of their guilds, and when middle-class girls, ignorant of the New Womanhood, could loll on triumphal cars with roses in their hair!
Thus arose the great manufacturing and commercial cities of the British Empire, in which at least three-fourths of the population belong to the working-class, while the lower middle-class consists only of small shopkeepers, and very very few handicraftsmen.
The crudities of such tales of adventure were softened and eliminated by the culturing influence of formal classicism and by a newly won admiration for the everyday element in life, contemporaneous with and dependent upon the gradual appreciation of middle-class worth.
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight an upper middle-class family in full plumage.
Neither the Irishman, Scotchman, nor Englishman, as such, can be made to yield much fun, if sketched alone. It is when ranged alongside of each other, and measured by the English middle-class standard of propriety, that they become entertaining. In a homogeneous society, like that of the United States, none of this material is to be found.
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