POST-WAR RELATIONS BETWEEN THE CLASSES.
To THE EDITOR or THE SPECTATOR:1 Ste,—My esteemed neighbour, Colonel Chrystie, is to be congratu- lated personally on his cheery optimism as to post-war relations between the different classes. Many of us would be happy indeed if we could echo his optimism and share his confidence as to the future. But the examples he gives to substantiate the ease he presents for acceptance do not seem to me to be in any sense conclusive, or indeed pertinent. No one, I think, could be more sensible of the courage and endurance in warfare, and cheerful patience in suffering, of our New Army than am I. That Army is establishing a record which will enable it to take its place as the equal of the Old Army, that glorious band of heroes who stood between us and disaster in the early months of war. But surely in the face of all we know as to the marked and rapid decline in the standard of home life, grimly noticeable in recent years, these qualities must be taken as having survived in spite of influences, actually demoralizing or passively unelevating. They are sur- vivals of those earlier traditions of honour, self-sacrifice, courage, and content, the qualities which, generally diffused among the people in the past, made England what it is. The months of military discipline to which the men of the New Army have been subjected, its influence, that is to say, has made them what they are, in the sense that it has brought them back to themselves, and enabled them to rise superior to that spirit of slackness and cynicism which pervaded them, speaking generally, before the war—a spirit resulting from lack of proper home influences and from the pernicious teaching of demagogues and sceptics. Unques- tionably the social and political problems which will face us as soon as peace is declared are of the most momentous and menacing character. Any one who has probed beneath the surface of politico-social appearances and arrived at the actual conditions knows that, so far from war having brought class nearer to class, it has widened the gulf between them—a gulf which was open and yawning before the changes and developments growing out of the war broadened and deepened it. This, of course, is said without reference to questions of human sympathy as shown in Red Cross work and the like, and human gratitude for services thus rendered. That is another story altogether, and does not affect
the present consideration. It is a fact, impossible to deny, that discontent, envy, and covetousness were making rapid headway before the great upheaval brought about by the war. I lived on the Continent in various countries for nearly a decade during the earlier years of the century. When I returned I was amazed to find the changes which had taken place, all for the worse, in the relations between the classes. So far as there being, after the war, no upper and lower classes, save in the eyes of snobs, that, with all respect to your correspondent, is utter nonsense. Snobbism is found in all classes; it is a vicious mental attitude, pure and simple, and consists in arrogating to oneself a superiority which neither birth, breeding, training, association, nor good manners justify, or in having all the first four and lacking the last, in others words—charity: The absurd affectations of equality, now so unpleasantly common on the part of the people, are quite as clearly M'the spirit of snobbery as the arrogant pretentiousness of the newly rich, who imagine that the possession of money, of fine clothes, and fine houses constitutes a right to claim social pre.
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