Since the Industrial Revolution and rise of the press, the middle-class has become more and more the real law-maker. The poor have voted legislators into power; the upper class in the main has formally made the laws; but the engineering of legislation has been, and is, the work of the middle class. And the amusing and pathetic thing is that the middle class has used its power to try to make other classes like itself. That it has succeeded so badly is largely due to the fact that the poor man is not simply an undeveloped middle-class man. The children at Seacombe showed true childish penetration in treating a gentry-boy as an animal of another species: the poor and the middle class are different in kind as well as in degree. (More different perhaps than the poor and the aristocrat). Their civilizations are not two stages of the same civilization, but two civilizations, two traditions, which have grown up concurrently, though not of course without considerable intermingling. To turn a typical poor man into a typical middle-class man is not only to develop him in some respects, and do the opposite in others; it is radically to alter him. The civilization of the poor may be more backward materially, but it contains the nucleus of a finer civilization than that of the middle class.
TWO CIVILIZATIONS
The two classes possess widely dissimilar outlooks. Their morale is different. Their ethics are different.[21] Middle class people frequently make a huge unnecessary outcry, and demand instant unnecessary legislation because they find among the poor conditions which would be intolerable to themselves but are by no means so to the poor. And again, the benevolent frequently accuse the poor of great ingratitude because, at some expense probably, they have pressed upon the poor what they themselves would like, but what the poor neither want nor are thankful for. The educated can sometimes enter fully, and even reasonably, into the sorrows of the uneducated, but it is seldom indeed that they can enter into their joys and consolations.
Broadly speaking, the middle-class is distinguished by the utilitarian virtues; the virtues, that is, which are means to an end; the profitable, discreet, expedient virtues: whereas the poor prefer what Maeterlinck calls 'the great useless virtues'—useless because they bring no apparent immediate profit, and great because by faith or deeply-rooted instinct we still believe them of more account than all the utilitarian virtues put together.[22]
The poor, one comes to believe firmly, if not interfered with by those who happen to be in power, are quite capable of fighting out their own salvation. A clear ring is what they want—the opportunity for their 'something in them tending to good' to develop on its own lines. (When I say 'a clear ring' I do not mean that one side should have seconds and towels provided and that the other side should be left with neither.) That their culture, so developed, will be different from our present middle-class culture, is certain; that it will be superior is probable. The middle class is in decay, for its reproductive instincts are losing their effective intensity, and it is afraid of having children; its culture, that it grafted on the old aristocratic stem, must decay with it. When the culture derived from the lower classes is ready to be grafted in its turn upon the old stem it is possible that mankind's progress will go backwards a little to find its footing, and will then take one of its great jumps forward.
5
THE SOCIO-POLITICAL PROBLEM
The socio-political problem turns out, on ultimate analysis, to be a wide restatement of the old theological Problem of Pain. Suffering does not necessarily make a fine character, but the characters that we recognise as fine could not, apparently, have been so without suffering. It is possible to say, "I have suffered, and though I am scarred and seared, yet I know that on the whole I am the better for that suffering. I do not now wish that I had not had that suffering. I even desire that those I love shall suffer so much as they can bear, that their conquest may be the greater, their joys the fuller, and their life the more intense." Nevertheless, the very next moment, the same man will try by every means possible to avoid suffering for himself and for those he loves. That is the dualism which dogs humanity in the mass no less than in the individual. That lies at the core of domestic politics. But it may be that the part of our nature which finds reason to be grateful for past suffering is higher than that part which seeks to avoid it in the future.
Waste of the benefits of suffering is waste indeed.
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