the road, stamps a man with all that this kind of people
least desire to have thrust upon them. And those who blame the
middle-class for their conventions in such matters, and who profess to
be above the care for cleanliness and clothes and social ritual which
marks the middle-class, are either anarchists by nature, or fools who
take what is but an effect of their wealth for a natural virtue.

I say it roundly; if it were not for the punctiliousness of the
middle-class in these matters all our civilization would go to pieces.
They are the conservators and the maintainers of the standard, the
moderators of Europe, the salt of society. For the kind of man who
boasts that he does not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a
man who cares nothing for all that civilization has built up and who
rather hates it, or else (and this is much more common) he is a rich
man, or accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford to waste
energy and stuff because he feels in a vague way that more clothes can
always be bought, that at the end of his vagabondism he can get
excellent dinners, and that London and Paris are full of luxurious
baths and barber shops. Of all the corrupting effects of wealth there
is none worse than this, that it makes the wealthy (and their
parasites) think in some way divine, or at least a lovely character of
the mind, what is in truth nothing but their power of luxurious
living. Heaven keep us all from great riches--I mean from very great
riches.

Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new clothes whenever they
feel inclined, neither can they end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a
great feast with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact what
they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to study cleanliness,
order, decency, sobriety, and a steady temper, and they fence all this
round and preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to wit,
with conventions, and they are quite right.

I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of these my colleagues,
but I recognize that they are on the just side in the quarrel; let
none of them go about pretending that I have not defended them in this
book.

So I thought of how I should put myself right with these people. I saw
that an elaborate story (as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who
forced me to change clothes: that I dressed thus for a bet: that I was
an officer employed as a spy, and was about to cross the frontier into
Germany in the