The spiritual effects of the fear of want are naturally most clearly observable in countries where it is most widespread and deep-rooted. England offers a particularly good field for observation of these phenomena, for economic exploitation by a conquering class which has merged into a powerful owning aristocracy, is there advanced to the point of breakdown; therefore all the results of economic exploitation are present in overflowing measure. The most striking, perhaps, are the servility and snobbery which find sanction even in the Church catechism, in the passage admonishing candidates for confirmation to order themselves lowly and reverently unto all their betters--that is to say, those born to a higher place in the social order. The English novelists, from the days of Richardson and Fielding down to the present, have faithfully recorded the unlovely characteristics bred in a people by the ever-present necessity of keeping an eye to the main chance; by the knowledge that fortune may depend less on merit and ability than on a servile currying of favour with those powerful persons who, through the fortuitous circumstance of birth, are in control of economic opportunity. Richardson was himself demoralized by the social system to which the economic system had given rise. His acceptance of arrogance in the owning class and abjectness in the exploited, shows how acquiescence in injustice can corrupt even a man of genius. “Pamela” is a veritable study in servility; an unconscious and devastating exposition of the basic principle of English society. Fielding, on the other hand, was too critical to be corrupted by it, and his books are all the more valuable for the objectivity with which he presents the demoralization that a predatory economic system has produced. What an array of characters he parades before his readers--avaricious, envious, suspicious, self-seeking, arrogant, venal! Even the hero of his great novel, “Tom Jones,” is not above prostituting himself to an elderly lady of wealth when he finds himself in danger of want and with no more honest means of getting a living, having been brought up as a gentleman, that is to say, an idler. This greatest of English novelists was well aware of the effect produced on the collective life of his nation by an arbitrary division of human kind into “High people and Low people,” and he took occasion to comment upon it with a penetrating satire.