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So long as the poor can console themselves by leaving it to Providence to avenge them at the Day of Judgment, it cannot be said that there is any virulent class-feeling amongst them. The most that you can make of it is that they occasionally feel spiteful.
But a still more curious and instructive fact is the permanence of certain names over a wide section of country; so much so that in places it is a common saying that one has only to be an A, or a B, or a T, to be certain of getting a farm. Whole parishes seem related, and not very distantly related either; and yet there is not the remotest class-feeling or esprit de corps.
The ideal social condition would be one in which, though men continued to form themselves into groups, no one thought the worse or the more lightly of another, because he belonged to a different group from himself. Connected with exaggerated class-feeling are abuses of-esprit de corps. Unlike class-feeling, esprit de corps is, in itself, a good.
During the entire year, although individual students were disciplined for individual offences, the faculty was not once forced to punish public disorder. This phenomenon will appear still more remarkable when we consider that meanwhile the so-called "class-feeling" had sprung up, and that students admitted from other colleges had endeavored to introduce certain traditional practices.
My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for example, have criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that the invincible tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would inevitably vitiate its working. All its disciplines would tend to give its members a sense of distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and rob it of any intimacy and sympathy with those outside the Order...
It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career. "She is too intelligent, too high-minded," he often reassured himself, "to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling.
But his life since he had known her was judged even by Jewdwine to be irreproachable. As Rickman understood the situation, he had been sacrificed to a prejudice, a convention, an ineradicable class-feeling on the part of the distinguished and fastidious don.
This class-feeling carried with it a curious sentiment of equality among officers of very different grades, which injuriously affected the spirit of subordination. Members, all, of a privileged social order, their equality as such was more clearly recognized than their inequality as junior and senior.
All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care. That excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism, save-your-own-soul-ism, and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at bottom." Sue jumped up and kissed Jude with passionate devotion.
In 1791, when the two parties were fairly formed and openly pitted against each other, a new element of discord had entered into politics, which added the bitterness of class-feeling to the usual animosity of contention.
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