year, with the home of exactly the same sort of person deriving from
the middle class. On the one hand, one will find the old aristocratic
British tradition in an instructively distorted state. All the
assumptions of an essential lordliness remain--and none of the duties.
All the pride is there still, but it is cramped, querulous, and
undignified. That lordliness is so ample that for even a small family
the income I have named will be no more than biting poverty, there will
be a pervading quality of struggle in this home to avoid work, to frame
arrangements, to discover cheap, loyal servants of the old type, to
discover six per cent. investments without risk, to interest
influential connections in the prospects of the children. The tradition
of the ruling class, which sees in the public service a pension scheme
for poor relations, will glow with all the colours of hope. Great
sacrifices will be made to get the boys to public schools, where they
can revive and expand the family connections. They will look forward as
a matter of course to positions and appointments, for the want of which
men of gifts and capacity from other social strata will break their
hearts, and they will fill these coveted places with a languid,
discontented incapacity. Great difficulty will be experienced in
finding schools for the girls from which the offspring of tradesmen are
excluded. Vulgarity has to be jealously anticipated. In a period when
Smartness (as distinguished from Vulgarity) is becoming an ideal, this
demands at times extremely subtle discrimination. The art of credit
will be developed to a high level.

Now in the other family economically indistinguishable from this, a
family with seven or eight hundred a year from investments, which
derives from the middle class, the tradition is one that, in spite of
the essential irresponsibility of the economic position, will urge this
family towards exertion as a duty. As a rule the resultant lies in the