Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
It is obvious that that part of the working-class which, working
diligently by the light of Mrs. Gooch's Golden Rule, looks forward to
the happy day when it will sit on thrones with Mr. Bazley and other
middle-class potentates, to survey, as Mr. Bright beautifully says,
"the cities it has built, the railroads it has made, the manufactures
it has produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest
mercantile navy the world has ever seen,"--it is obvious, I say, that
this part of the working-class is, or is in a fair way to be, one in
spirit with the industrial middle-class. It is notorious that our
middle-class liberals have long looked forward to this consummation,
when the working-class shall join forces with them, aid them heartily
to carry forward their great works, go in a body to their tea-
meetings, and, in short, enable them to bring about their millennium.
That part of the working-class, therefore, which does really seem to
lend itself to these great aims, may, with propriety, be numbered by
us among the Philistines. That part of it, again, which [104] so
much occupies the attention of philanthropists at present,--the part
which gives all its energies to organising itself, through trades'
unions and other means, so as to constitute, first, a great working-
class power, independent of the middle and aristocratic classes, and
then, by dint of numbers, give the law to them, and itself reign
absolutely,--this lively and interesting part must also, according to
our definition, go with the Philistines; because it is its class and
its class-instinct which it seeks to affirm, its ordinary self not
its best self; and it is a machinery, an industrial machinery, and
power and pre-eminence and other external goods which fill its
thoughts, and not an inward perfection. It is wholly occupied,
according to Plato's subtle expression, with the things of itself and
not its real self, with the things of the State and not the real
State. But that vast portion, lastly, of the working-class which,
raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty
and squalor, and is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an
Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is
beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it
likes, bawling what it likes, [105] breaking what it likes,--to this
vast residuum we may with great propriety give the name of Populace.
Thus we have got three distinct terms, Barbarians, Philistines,
Populace, to denote roughly the three great classes into which our
society is divided; and though this humble attempt at a scientific
nomenclature falls, no doubt, very far short in precision of what
might be required from a writer equipped with a complete and coherent
philosophy, yet, from a notoriously unsystematic and unpretending
writer, it will, I trust, be accepted as sufficient.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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