Social Forces in England and AmericaWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Social Forces in England and America
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
England -- Social conditions -- 20th century; Social problems; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918
And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There is
no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne, no
legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social
structure of leisure, power and State responsibility which in the old
European theory of Society was supposed to give significance to the
whole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not
correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the
middle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between the
dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the
central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head
or the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slaveholding “county
family” traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory. So
that in a very real sense the past of the American nation is in Europe,
and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This community
was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches, and
brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and farmer;
it followed the normal development of the middle class under Progress
everywhere, and became capitalistic. The huge later immigration has
converged upon the great industrial centres and added merely a vast
non-servile element of employees to the scheme.
America has been and still very largely is a one-class country. It is a
great sea of human beings detached from their traditions of origin. The
social difference from Europe appears everywhere, and nowhere more
strikingly than in the railway carriages. In England the compartments in
these are either “first class,” originally designed for the aristocracy,
or “second class,” for the middle class, or “third class,” for the
populace. In America there is only one class, one universal simple
democratic car. In the Southern States, however, a proportion of these
simple democratic cars are inscribed with the word “White,” whereby nine
million people are excluded. But to this original even-handed treatment
there was speedily added a more sumptuous type of car, the parlour car,
accessible to extra dollars; and then came special types of train, all
made up of parlour cars and observation cars and the like. In England
nearly every train remains still first, second and third, or first and
third. And now, quite outdistancing the differentiation of England,
America produces private cars and private trains, such as Europe
reserves only for crowned heads.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account