The influence retained by the old middle class should not be underestimated, however. Especially in the countryside the lawyer, the vicar, the retired officer who is the local Justice of the Peace continue to wield considerable authority. And in clinging to traditional forms through two wars and the long night of austerity, the middle class has demonstrated its essential toughness. The old middle class still reads _The Times_ of London, that great newspaper, although you are liable to be informed in country drawing-rooms that _The Times_ is "a bit Bolshie nowadays." The forms and felicities of British life are encouraged and supported by the old middle class. The Church of England, the local Conservative Party fete, the gymkhana, the voluntary social services, the Old Comrades Associations of regiments owe their continued life to unstinting aid from the men and women of this class. It has had its periods of blindness (Munich was one), but it has never doubted where duty lay. When the war began in 1939--or, as its members would say, "when the balloon went up"--it sent away its sons and daughters and settled down to man the Home Guard and the civil-defense services. It suffered bombing and austerity, but it made certain that when the boys and girls came home there was a dance at the yacht club--some Polish sailors lived there during the war, and everyone pitched in to put it back in shape--and all the food the rationing would allow. The positive characteristics of this class are impressive: its courage, its desire that each generation have a wider education and a greater opportunity, its cool calmness in the face of danger, its willingness to accept as a duty the responsibility for the lives of untaught millions living in famine and poverty and to labor for their welfare, its acceptance of the conviction of duty well done as the suitable reward for a lifetime of work. To me these seem to outweigh the pettiness, the snobbery, the overbearing self-confidence. No nation can do without such positive characteristics, and it will be a sorry day for Britain if the change in the middle class eliminates their influence on the country. We Americans are fond of thinking of Britain as a settled, caste-ridden society. But at least two groups, the new middle class and the resettled working class, are on the move or have just moved into a new status, politically, economically, and socially. Moreover, one large class, the middle class, is in the process of changing. British society is much more mobile than it appears from the outside because of the Britons' desire to retain traditional forms while the substance changes.