determines social standing, but the character of a man's work, and it
may take a generation or two before this fades out of the family
tradition. Thus banking, law, medicine, public utilities, newspapers,
the church, large retailing, brokerage, manufacture, are rated at a
different social value from salesmanship, superintendence, expert
technical work, nursing, school teaching, shop keeping; and those, in
turn, are rated as differently from plumbing, being a chauffeur,
dressmaking, subcontracting, or stenography, as these are from being a
butler, lady's maid, a moving picture operator, or a locomotive
engineer. And yet the financial return does not necessarily coincide
with these gradations.

3

Whatever the tests of admission, the social set when formed is not a
mere economic class, but something which more nearly resembles a
biological clan. Membership is intimately connected with love,
marriage and children, or, to speak more exactly, with the attitudes
and desires that are involved. In the social set, therefore, opinions
encounter the canons of Family Tradition, Respectability, Propriety,
Dignity, Taste and Form, which make up the social set's picture of
itself, a picture assiduously implanted in the children. In this
picture a large space is tacitly given to an authorized version of
what each set is called upon inwardly to accept as the social standing
of the others. The more vulgar press for an outward expression of the
deference due, the others are decently and sensitively silent about
their own knowledge that such deference invisibly exists. But that
knowledge, becoming overt when there is a marriage, a war, or a social
upheaval, is the nexus of a large bundle of dispositions classified by
Trotter [Footnote: W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace.]