Meanwhile you, putting all these developments together in your mind, can now contemplate the Middle Class understandingly. You know now how it sprang from the propertied class as an educated younger-son class without property, and supported itself by practising the professions, and by doing the business of the propertied class. You know how it rose to supreme power and riches when the development of modern machinery (called the Industrial Revolution) made business so big and complicated that neither the propertied class nor the working class could understand it, and the middle class men who did (called generally employers), became masters of the situation. You know how, when the first generations of employers had found out how to do this work, and established a routine of doing it which any literate man could learn and practise, and when all that remained was to find more and more capital to feed it as its concerns grew bigger and bigger, the supremacy passed from the employers to the financiers who hold it at present. You know also that this last change has been accompanied by a change in the status of the employer, who instead of hiring the land and capital of the propertied classes for a fixed payment of rent and interest, and taking as his profit all that remains, is now simply employed to manage for companies and trusts, the shareholders taking everything that is left after they have paid rent and wages (including his salary). You see that in applying for such posts he has to meet the competition not only of other middle class men as of old, but of clever sons of the working class, raised into the middle class by education at the public expense by our system of scholarships, which act as ladders from the elementary school to the University or the Polytechnic. You see that this applies not only to employers, but much more to their clerks. Clerking was formerly a monopoly of the less energetic sons of the middle class. Now that everybody has to go to school the middle class monopoly of reading, writing, and ciphering is gone; and skilled manual workers are better paid than clerks, being scarcer. As to parlormaids, what ordinary typist does not envy their creature comforts? The Middle Station in Life no longer justifies the pæan in its praise which Daniel Defoe raised in Robinson Crusoe. For those who possess no special talent of a lucrative kind, it is now the least eligible class in the community. 46 THE PROLETARIAT