adjusted to and modified by the new classes, with new relationships and
new necessities, that the revolution in industrial organization and
domestic conveniences has created.

The interplay of old tradition and new necessities becomes at times
very curious. Consider, for example, the home influences of the child
of a shopman in a large store, or those of the child of a skilled
operative--an engineer of some sort let us say--in England. Both these
are new types in the English social body; the former derives from the
old middle class, the class that was shopkeeping in the towns and
farming in the country, the class of the Puritans, the Quakers, the
first manufacturers, the class whose mentally active members become the
dissenters, the old Liberals, and the original New Englanders. The
growth of large businesses has raised a portion of this class to the
position of Sir John Blundell Maple, Sir Thomas Lipton, the intimate
friend of our King, and our brewer peers; it has raised a rather more
numerous section to the red plush glories of Wagon-Lit trains and their
social and domestic equivalents, and it has reduced the bulk of the
class to the status of employees for life. But the tradition that our
English shopman is in the same class as his master, that he has been
apprentice and improver, and is now assistant, with a view to presently
being a master himself, still throws its glamour over his life and his
home, and his child's upbringing. They belong to the middle class, the
black coat and silk-hat class, and the silk hat crowns the adolescence
of their boys as inevitably as the toga made men in ancient Rome. Their
house is built, not for convenience primarily, but to realize whatever
convenience is possible after the rigid traditional requirements have
been met; it is the extreme and final reduction of the plan of a better
class house, and the very type of its owner. As one sees it in the
London suburbs devoted to clerks and shopmen, it stands back a yard or