Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which the younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves as far as the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now recruited from the working class as well. These recruits, with no gentlemanly nonsense about them, are not only better taught than the boys who go to cheapish middle class schools, but better trained to face the realities of life. Also the old differences in speech and dress and manners are much less than they were, partly because the working class is picking up middle class manners, but much more because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the middle class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but ashamed of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were a boy nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for capital, and for position in the civil service by the sons of men whose grandfathers would never have dreamed of presuming to sit down in his presence. The futile propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable and grossly insolent civil servants whom Dickens described, have to be content nowadays with the refuse of middle class employment. They are discontented, unhappy, impecunious, struggling with a false position, borrowing (really begging) from their relatives, and unable to realize, or unwilling to admit, that they have fallen out of the propertied class, not into an intermediate position where they have a monopoly of all the occupations and employments that require a little education and manners, but right down into the ranks of the hungry, without the hardening that makes the hungry life bearable. And what of the daughters? Their business is to get married; and I can remember the time when there was no other hopeful opening in life for them. When they failed to find husbands, and no special provision had been made for them, they became governesses or school teachers or “companions” or genteel beggars under the general heading of poor relations. They had been carefully trained to feel that it was unladylike to work, and still more unladylike to propose marriage to men. The professions were closed to them. The universities were closed to them. The business offices were closed to them. Their poverty cut them off from propertied society. Their ladylikeness cut them off from the society of working people as poor as themselves, and from inter-marriage with them. Life was a ghastly business for them.