CLASS DISTINCTIONS.
WE wish some one of the many thoughtful observers who are studying social development in Western Europe would deliver a careful lecture, or write a well-weighed paper, upon the social rise within this century of the English middle class. We believe it has been at least as great as the elevation of the workman, though it is not as easy to describe owing to the difficulty of recalling, without the aid of books, the differences which have been established in shades Of manner. We should not know how to establish, for instance, the fact that the similarity in modes of life which now exists in London at all events among all grades of society, had arisen within the last fifty years, and was the result of a very curious change in feeling, as well as of a. system under which many grades ranging downwards from the top are now educated exactly alike. The child of the professional is now taught not only in the same way, but by the same men, as the child of the Peer, the only difference being that the former, partly from hereditary aptitude, partly from a sense that he has to live by his education, learns a little quicker, and forces himself to study with a little less reluctance. Manners have been equalised, like education, until the classes are indistinguishable except upon particular occasions ; the most real distinction, perhaps, being that the well-born man of from twenty to thirty has usually about him some flavour of the country squire, and the professional man something of the air of citizenship, a difference derived in both cases from early association. Almost all men would, we believe, on reflection acknowledge the fact, but very few are aware how very recent the equalisation of the different castes has been, or how great sixty years ago was the differ- ence in social estimation between the professionals and the squires. It existed least, perhaps, in the case of barristers, the great prizes in that profession, which were then, as now, social prizes, as well as prizes in the way of money, being very early taken into account. The Judge always ranked before the squire, and the man who might be a Judge was therefore reckoned by the squire as an equal, though till he won his way well up he might be such an equal as a poor relation is in a great house. Less respect was accorded to the clergyman, though this is so frequently denied, the truth being that a clergyman's real grade was settled not by his cloth, but by accidental circumstances,—his birth, his means, or much more rarely, his mental powers. His character did not tell heavily in his favour until he began to be old, a fact which we think we notice even now when all clergymen of the Establishment are accounted gentlemen. Outside the Establishment all divines were alike boycotted by society, occasionally with circumstances of contumely -which have left their sting down to our own day. We can ourselves remember when it was a point of high etiquette to refuse the prefix Reverend to all Nonconformist clergymen without distinction, and when a country town professional of the plainer sort would apologise for the presence of a. Unitarian pastor better educated than himself at his table. Attorneys, as they were called then, unless influential in politics, or as advisers to the great, were positively scouted and shunned, described as men who were "gentlemen only by Act of Parliament," and regarded by the squires as in some sense their servants. The latter would resent being kept waiting in a lawyer's office more than customers now resent being kept waiting in a shop. The " lawyer," as he was called when men intended to be respectful —" attorney " having been a term of opprobrium for half a cen- tury before it was abandoned—was, in fact, regarded as little above the auctioneer, and not at all above the land agent. His easiest road out of the social slough was to become, if he could, a banker, that particular kind of moneylender having, for reasons of convenience, been admitted very early to be a gentleman. Other professions, except of course the soldier and, in a much less recognised degree, the sailor in the Queen's service, there were none. Engineers were regarded as superior workmen, professors there were none outside London and the Universities, while doctors, who are now so well regarded, shared in the discredit which has always attached to servants of the body, and were, in fact, with certain marked exceptions, very much in the position now occupied by country dentists. They were anxious in many places to establish a marked distinction between themselves and the chemists, and to this end often gave up dispensing at much loss to themselves and grave risk and inconvenience to their patients. You can see deep traces of the old feeling, not only in. Dickens, who, we imagine, thought all doctors pretenders, but in Thackeray, who did not, at all events, intend to be a caricaturist. The recol- lection of those old days still lingers, we fancy, in the profession, and helps to produce at once their useful .dislike of all unqualified "practitioners "—a word of uni- versal meaning now reserved to practitioners of one art—and to keep up the marked degree of professional sensitiveness they occasionally betray. The regimental chaplain fights hard for respect, sometimes winning it, sometimes not ; but the regimental surgeon is almost savage over his right to " positive " military rank, refuses, in fact, to enter the Queen's service without it. Officers of merchantmen, not being East India Company's captains, were absolutely un- known in professional society sixty years ago, being hardly on a par with a most contemned class, unsuccessful authors, or journalists not at the head of powerful London journals. A few of the latter were respected because they wielded political power, but the smaller journalist, especially in the provinces, was considered about on a level with his printer, and a printer of that date. All tradesmen were rigorously excluded from cultivated society—the writer has seen a very wealthy tradesman of unusually high character refused a chair by a country lawyer of acknowledged geniality—and ' manufacturers, unless their establishments were on the • largest scale, were accounted tradesmen. Curiously enough, too, descent, upon which in all other grades of society an extravagant value was placed, was never allowed to count in favour of the shopkeeper, a peculiarity for which we can assign no reason, the shopkeeper, if he retired, resuming his birthplace in the world without any social demur. The feeling, however, must have lingered very late, for Mrs. Henry Wood, who was the very embodiment of the old ideas of social rank, made a defence of it the basis of one of her best stories. A little earlier (1823) Mrs. Gore made the collision between gentlefolks and merchants the ,mogif of an entire series of novels, exaggerating, we think, a little the way in which merchants were kept down. A merchant's grade was always, so far as we know, regulated by his wealth, though it is true that in the last half of the eighteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth a certain disrespect attached to the "man of money " made "abroad." The nabobs were hated, the West India men were disliked, contractors for the war were watched with almost comic suspicion— the writerr emembers as a boy to have heard them accused of intolerable solecisms, particularly the founder of what is now a great house—and Scott's portrait of a Levantine in St. " Ronan's Well" was regarded as very lifelike, but too favourable.
It has nearly all passed away—not quite;' a dislike for the shop still lingering, so that a clergyman glad to obtain a good , place in one for his boy always speaks of him as "in a City , berth "—and the cause has not been entirely the new passion for income, or the astounding rise in the degree of happiness Iwhich income can secure. The thirst for money has gone deep, no doubt, and has visibly debased the poorer aristocracy, who, as Punch says in this year's "Comic Almanack," are all worshipping "Ike" on his return from Johannesburg; but the new value placed on education has done more than the money greed. Anybody may enter any profession now, and the professionals do not make great fortunes, while the fortunes they do make have, as regards the interest they yield, been cat at a blow in half. The class is far from a rich one, yet it has completely survived contempt. With this change also has come a new way of regarding the real "rise from the ranks," that is, from the position of the manual labourer. The reader can remember when it was the height of dis- courtesy, indeed almost showed malignity, to allude to such an incident in a man's career ; but now the biographer pauses over it as something most creditable to his hero. Men are still sensitive about their connection with shops—the writer knew a Bishop who could never be persuaded that his critics were not in their minds dwelling on that blot in his pedigree —but nobody would hesitate to admit that his father wielded the hammer or worked in a sawpit, or, best occupation of all, followed the plough. Sixty or seventy years ago he would have recalled the fact with a shudder, perhaps have paid heavily to the pedigree-makers to conceal it.
How far down will the change go ; will it reach right down to the bottom P We fear not, for it will be arrested at last by the violent dissimilarity in ways of living, produced mainly by violent differences of income. The Fabians think, we believe, these may be got over by the well-to-do abandon- ing their ways ; but this has not happened in America, nor do we think its occurrence consistent with human nature. The line of real difference seems to be the keep- ing of servants, and we greatly doubt whether refined women, if they bear children, will voluntarily consent to do all handwork for themselves. The prospect of a change in that feeling is too remote to be worth discussion, and there may be two other serious breaks in the endless march towards equality of ways. We think it probable, or at all events possible, that society, tired to death with the pressure of numbers, may divide itself into hereditary cliques, who will erect and keep up an impalpable but impassable wall between themselves and their fellow-men. Something of the kind has existed among the old families of Switzerland for a very long period, and we are told that a disposition towards it is mani- festing itself in most of the great cities of America. We feel certain also that as society slowly obliterates all other dis- tinctions, the distinction of birth, which cannot be purchased, which is incommunicable, and in which the wildest Radicals have some sort of belief—science teaching them some strong ideas as to heredity—will in some way or other revive. The idea of " rank " may disappear, as it has done in Greece, and, to a certain extent, throughout the Mussnlman world ; but the idea of birth agrees with the Anglo-Saxon admiration for continuousness, and it may revive once more. We notice that whenever a shopkeeper can say "Established in 1797," he parades that fact on his cards.
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