In the foregoing chapters a general view has been given of the social conditions under which, modified it may be by the influences of his historic past, the character of the average middle class Englishman of the Victorian epoch is formed. What is the personal result, the concrete individual product of these forces? The epithet 'middle class' is employed in deference to traditional wont, but is in great measure misleading because the tendency of the age, the uniformity of the social and educational discipline through which most Englishmen pass tends increasingly to obliterate distinctions of conventional grade, and in tastes, pursuits, prejudices, to assimilate all to a single type. 'They look upon you as we do upon a December fall of snow; as a seasonable, unaccountable, uncomfortable work of God, sent for some good purpose, to be revealed hereafter.' The restlessness which in the British visitor puzzled the Mussulman when _Eothen_ was written as a national quality has of late increased among us.[44] From those who represent Royalty to those who represent manual labour for daily bread, an impatient restlessness is socially a note of the period which has perfected steam locomotion by sea or land, and by the electric telegraph has almost annihilated time. The cheap press, with its ubiquitous correspondents and historians of all contemporary ranks and occurrences in the body politic, has transformed the severely domesticated Briton of both sexes, of all ages, who belonged to a bygone generation, into an eager, actively enquiring, socially omniscient citizen of the world, ever on the lookout for new excitements, habitually demanding social pleasure in fresh forms. The insularity of the national character has to some extent disappeared in the tide of new ideas, and novel modes of life that from Continental sources are perpetually overflowing into our land. The Universities, as shown in a preceding chapter, have been brought to the door of the labourer at his bench, to the shop assistant at his counter, to the clerk at his desk. If this does not always imply an universal access of real education, no one who knows the England of to-day can doubt that it never fails to mean the multiplication of all kinds of knowledge, or to generate the social aspirations, and the thirst for that kind of self-improvement, real or imaginary, which is accompanied by a growing demand for social existence of an animated kind, for a daily life less insular in its organization and less restricted to the domestic hearth. Some prejudices, as was natural among a conservative people, were on its first introduction excited against the new order of things.