This is “middle-class” sentiment of course. The aristocratic contempt for the tradesman and all his works has not suffered serious mitigation through all this growth of new methods of reputability. The three conventionally recognised classes, upper, middle, and lower, are all and several pecuniary categories; the upper being typically that (aristocratic) class which is possessed of wealth without having worked or bargained for it; while the middle class have come by their holdings through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and the lower class gets what it has by workmanship. It is a gradation of (_a_) predation, (_b_) business, (_c_) industry; the former being disserviceable and gainful, the second gainful, and the third serviceable. And no modern civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability as not to recognise off-hand that the first category is meritorious and the last discreditable, whatever his individual prejudices may lead him to think of the second. Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without predatory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic class loses its pecuniary advantage it becomes questionable. A poverty-stricken aristocrat is a “decayed gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a disingenuous figure of speech. The transition from the original predatory phase of the pecuniary culture to the succeeding commercial phase signifies the emergence of a middle class in such force as presently to recast the working arrangements of the cultural scheme and make peaceable business (gainful traffic) the ruling interest of the community. With the same movement emerges a situation which is progressively more favourable to the intellectual animus required for workmanship and an advance in technology. The state of the industrial arts advances, and with its advance the accumulation of wealth is accelerated, the gainfulness of business traffic increases, and the middle (business) class grows along with it. It is in the conscious interest of this class to further the gainfulness of industry, and as this end is correlated with the productiveness of industry it is also, though less directly, correlated with improvements in technology.