self-control of
the people. Control, in short should be the paramount criterion of new
legislation. A proximate advantage, unless it be a matter of life and
death, is too dearly purchased by an ultimate diminution of
self-control.

4

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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[21] "The more one sees of the poor in their own homes, the more
one becomes convinced that their ethical views, taken as a whole,