and wealth and
luxury to polish them, they have made their own the high standard of
life and manners of an aristocratic and refined class. Not having all
the dissipations and distractions of this class, they are much more
seriously alive to the power of intellect and knowledge, to the power of
beauty. The sense of conduct, too, meets with fewer trials in this
class. To some extent, however, their contiguousness to the aristocratic
class has now the effect of materializing them, as it does the class of
newly enriched people. The most palpable action is on the young amongst
them, and on their standard of life and enjoyment. But in general, for
this whole class, established facts, the materialism which they see
regnant, too much block their mental horizon, and limit the
possibilities of things to them. They are deficient in openness and
flexibility of mind, in free play of ideas, in faith and ardor.
Civilized they are, but they are not much of a civilizing force; they
are somehow bounded and ineffective.

So on the middle class they produce singularly little effect. What the
middle class sees is that splendid piece of materialism, the
aristocratic class, with a wealth and luxury utterly out of their reach,
with a standard of social life and manners, the offspring of that wealth
and luxury, seeming utterly out of their reach also. And thus they are
thrown back upon themselves--upon a defective type of religion, a narrow
range of intellect and knowledge, a stunted sense of beauty, a low
standard of manners. And the lower class see before them the
aristocratic class, and its civilization, such as it is, even infinitely
more out of _their_ reach than out of that of the middle class; while
the life of the middle class, with its unlovely types of religion,
thought, beauty, and manners, has naturally, in general, no great
attractions for them either. And so they, too, are thrown back upon
themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their _fun_. Now, then, you
will understand what I meant by saying that our inequality materializes
our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower.

And the greater the inequality the more marked is its bad action upon
the middle and lower classes. In Scotland the landed aristocracy fills
the scene, as is well known, still more than in England; the other
classes are more squeezed back and effaced. And the social civilization
of the lower middle class and of the poorest class, in Sc