Mankind in the MakingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Philosophy
Mankind in the Making
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Social problems; Social sciences
Compare, again, the home conditions of the child of a well-connected
British shareholder inheriting, let us say, seven or eight hundred a
year, with the home of exactly the same sort of person deriving from
the middle class. On the one hand, one will find the old aristocratic
British tradition in an instructively distorted state. All the
assumptions of an essential lordliness remain--and none of the duties.
All the pride is there still, but it is cramped, querulous, and
undignified. That lordliness is so ample that for even a small family
the income I have named will be no more than biting poverty, there will
be a pervading quality of struggle in this home to avoid work, to frame
arrangements, to discover cheap, loyal servants of the old type, to
discover six per cent. investments without risk, to interest influential
connections in the prospects of the children. The tradition of the
ruling class, which sees in the public service a pension scheme for poor
relations, will glow with all the colours of hope. Great sacrifices will
be made to get the boys to public schools, where they can revive and
expand the family connections. They will look forward as a matter of
course to positions and appointments, for the want of which men of gifts
and capacity from other social strata will break their hearts, and they
will fill these coveted places with a languid, discontented incapacity.
Great difficulty will be experienced in finding schools for the girls
from which the offspring of tradesmen are excluded. Vulgarity has to be
jealously anticipated. In a period when Smartness (as distinguished from
Vulgarity) is becoming an ideal, this demands at times extremely subtle
discrimination. The art of credit will be developed to a high level.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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