individualities, by
methods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantly
thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sons
and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild
extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety
and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man. The rest
of the population was landless and, except by working directly or
indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist. And such
was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the
stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very
few indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the
natural and only conceivable order of the world.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am
displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless
bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived
lives of paradisiacal happiness. The pit of insecurity below them
made itself felt, even though it was not comprehended. Life about
them was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed
people, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities,
were not to be escaped. There was below the threshold of their minds
an uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about social
economy but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to think.
Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread of
falling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves by
new ropes, their cultivation of "connexions," of interests, their
desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constant
ignoble preoccupation. You must read Thackeray to get the full
flavor of their lives. Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class
distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants.
Read their surviving books. Each generation bewails the decay
of that "fidelity" of servants, no generation ever saw. A world
that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they
never understood. They believed there was not enough of anything
to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and
an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with
a sense of right to their disproportionate share. They maintained
a common intercourse as "Society" of all who were practically
secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquent
of the quality of their philosophy. But