THE MIDDLE STATION IN LIFE

AND now, if the landlords and capitalists can neither make anything nor even tell others how to make it; and if the workers can do nothing until they are told what to do, how does the world get on? There must be some third class standing between the propertied class on the one hand and the propertyless class on the other, to lease the land and hire the capital and tell the workers what to do with them.

There is. You can see for yourself that there is a middle class which does all the managing and directing and deciding work of the nation, besides carrying on the learned and literary and artistic professions. Let us consider how this class arose, and how it is continually recruited from the capitalist families.

The capitalists do something more than merely own. They marry and have children. Now an income which is comfortable for two people may not be enough for three or four children in addition, to say nothing of possibly twice or thrice that number. And when the three or four children grow up and marry and have three or four children each, what meant riches for the grandparents may mean poverty for the grandchildren.

To avoid this, propertied families may arrange that only the eldest son shall inherit the property, leaving the younger sons to shift for themselves, and the daughters to marry men of property if they can. This is called primogeniture. Until 1926 it was the law of the land in England when the owner of a landed estate died without leaving a will to the contrary. Where there is no such law, and all the children inherit equal shares of the parents’ property, as they do among the peasant proprietors in France, the family must come to an arrangement of the same kind between themselves, or else sell the property and leave its owners with a few pounds each that will not last them very long. Therefore they almost always do agree that the younger children shall live by working like the hungry, whilst the eldest keeps the farm and cultivates it. This cannot be done when the property is not land but capital, and all the members of the family are living on the interest of hired out spare money. Parents may make wills leaving all of it or most of it to one son; but they do not do this as a rule; and sooner or later the property gets divided and divided among children and other next-of-kin until the inheritors cannot live on their shares.

But please remark that the younger sons who are thus thrown on the world to earn their living have the tastes and habits and speech and appearance and education of rich men. They are well connected, as we say. Their near relations may be peers. Some of them have been schooled at Eton and Harrow, and have taken degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. Others have less distinguished connections. Their parents or grandparents may have made money in business; and they may have gone to the big city schools, or to day schools, instead of to Eton, and either to one of the new democratic universities or to no university at all. Their most important relative may be a mayor or alderman. But they are educated at secondary as distinguished from elementary schools; and though not what they themselves call great swells, they have the manners and appearance and speech and habits of the capitalist class, are described as gentlemen, and politely addressed by letter as Esquires instead of plain Misters.

All these propertyless people who have the ways and the culture of propertied ones have to live by their wits. They go into the army and navy as officers, or into the upper grades of the civil service. They become clergymen, doctors, lawyers, authors, actors, painters, sculptors, architects, schoolmasters, university professors, astronomers and the like, forming what we call the professional class. They are treated with special respect socially; but they see successful men of business, inferior to themselves in knowledge, talent, character, and public spirit, making much larger incomes. The highest sorts of mental work are often so unremunerative that it is impossible to make a living by practising them commercially. Spinoza lived by grinding lenses, and Rousseau by copying music. Einstein lives by professorships. Newton lived, not by discovering gravitation and measuring fluxions, but by acting as Master of the Mint, which other men could have done as well. Even when a profession is comparatively lucrative and popular, its gains are restricted by the fact that the work must all be done by the practitioner’s own hand; for a surgeon cannot employ a thousand subordinates to deal with a million patients as a soap king deals with a million customers, nor the President of the Royal Academy hand over a two thousand guinea portrait sitter to his secretary. The years of professional success are usually preceded by a long struggle with scanty means. I myself am held to be a conspicuous example of success in the most lucrative branch of the literary profession; but until I was thirty I could not make even a bare living by my pen. At thirty-eight I thought myself passing rich on six or seven pounds a week; and even now, when I am seventy, and have achieved all that can be achieved commercially at my job, I see in the paper every day, under the heading Wills and Bequests, that the widow of some successful man of business, wholly unknown to fame, has died leaving a fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance.

The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they are not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the dignity of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming aptitude for one or other of the professions, advise them strongly to go in for business. The man of business may not have much chance of a public statue unless he pays for it and presents it to his native town with a spacious public park attached; and his occupation may be a dry one in itself, however exciting the prospect of pocketing more and more money may make it. But he can make profits not only out of his work, like the surgeon or painter, but out of the work of thousands of others as well. And his work is not necessarily dry: modern businesses tend to become more interesting and important, and even more scientific, than average professional work. Their activities are much more varied: in fact modern commercial magnates, when they control a dozen different businesses, become better informed and better developed mentally than the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are learning to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers, diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially undeveloped countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of learning and intellect: in European centres today commercial society is a more effective reserve of culture than professional society. When the professional man or the public servant tells his son that a berth in the civil service is a blind alley, or doctoring at the call of the night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them with the unlimited prospects and the infinite scope for personal initiative in business, he is recommending the young man to improve on his father’s condition instead of starting him on the downward path socially.

And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and spare money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough money out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring in a profit as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by men and women with the necessary ability and decision who have the particular sort of pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business requires. Even more staggering profits are made sometimes by accident, the business man hitting by chance on something new that the public happens to fancy. Millions are made by medicines which injure people’s health instead of improving it (read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers that leave the buyer as bald as before. Articles that nobody needs, and sham pleasures that give only fatigue and boredom at extravagant prices, are advertized and advertized until people are beglamored into thinking they cannot do without them.

But the main scope in business is for honorable and useful activity, from growing food and building houses and making clothes, or manufacturing spades and sewing-machines, to laying cables round the world, and building giant ships to turn the ocean or the air into a highway. The planning and management and ordering of this gives employment to able and energetic men who have no property, but have the education and social address of the propertied class. The educated who are neither able nor energetic, and who have no professions, find employment as agents or clerks carrying out the routine and keeping the accounts of businesses which the able ones have established and are directing. And the women of their class are forced to live by marrying them.

In this way we get, between the propertied class and the hungry mass, a middle class which acts as a sort of Providence to both of them. It cultivates the land and employs the capital of the property holders, paying them the rent of their lands and the hire of their spare money without asking them to lift a finger, and giving the hungry wages to live on without asking them to think or decide or know or do anything except their own little bit of the job in hand. The hungry have neither to buy the material nor to sell the product, neither to organize the service nor find the customer. Like children they are told what to do, and fed and lodged and clothed whilst they are doing it, not always very handsomely perhaps; but at worst they are kept alive long enough to produce a fresh set of hungry ones to replace them when they are worn out.

There are always a few cases in which this management is done, not by descendants of propertied folk, but by men and women sprung from the hungriest of the hungry. These are the geniuses who know most of the things that other people have to be taught, and who educate themselves as far as they need any education. But there are so few of them that they need not be taken into account. In great social questions we are dealing with the abilities of ordinary citizens: that is, the abilities we can depend on everyone except invalids and idiots possessing, and not with what one man or woman in ten thousand can do. In spite of several cases in which persons born in poverty and ignorance have risen to make vast fortunes, to become famous as philosophers, discoverers, authors, and even rulers of kingdoms, to say nothing of saints and martyrs, we may take it that business and the professions are closed to those who cannot read and write, travel and keep accounts, besides dressing, speaking, behaving, and handling and spending money more or less in the manner of the propertied classes.

This is another way of saying that until about fifty years ago the great mass of our people working for weekly wages were as completely shut out from the professions and from business as if there had been a law forbidding them on pain of death to attempt to enter them. I remember wondering when I was a lad at a man who was in my father’s employment as a miller. He could neither read nor write nor cipher (that is, do sums on paper); but his natural faculty for calculation was so great that he could solve instantly all the arithmetical problems that arose in the course of his work: for instance, if it were a question of so many sacks of flour at so much a sack, he could tell you the answer straight off without thinking, which was more than my father or his clerks could do. But because he did not know his alphabet, and could not put pen to paper, and had not the speech and manners and habits and dress without which he would not have been admitted into the company of merchants and manufacturers, or of lawyers, doctors, and clergymen, he lived and died a poor employee, without the slightest chance of rising into the middle class, or the faintest pretension to social equality with my father. And my father, though he was propertyless, and worked as a middle class civil servant and subsequently as a merchant, was not at all proud of being a member of the middle class: on the contrary, he resented that description, holding on to his connexion with the propertied class as a younger son of many former younger sons, and therefore, though unfortunately reduced to living not very successfully by his wits, a man of family and a gentleman.

But this was sixty years ago. Since then we have established Communism in education. If my father’s miller were a boy now, he would go to school for nine years, whether his parents liked it or not, at the expense of the whole community; and his mathematical gift would enable him to win a scholarship that would take him on to a secondary school, and another scholarship there that would take him to the university and qualify him for a profession. At the very least he would become an accountant, even were it only as a bookkeeper or clerk. In any case he would be qualified for middle class employment and pass into that class.

Now the social significance of this is that the middle class, which the younger sons and their descendants formerly had all to themselves as far as the most desirable positions in it were concerned, is now recruited from the working class as well. These recruits, with no gentlemanly nonsense about them, are not only better taught than the boys who go to cheapish middle class schools, but better trained to face the realities of life. Also the old differences in speech and dress and manners are much less than they were, partly because the working class is picking up middle class manners, but much more because they are forcing their own manners and speech on the middle class as standards. A man like my father, half a merchant, but ashamed of it and unable to make up his mind to it, and half a gentleman without any property to uphold his pretension, would, if he were a boy nowadays, be beaten hollow in the competition for land, for capital, and for position in the civil service by the sons of men whose grandfathers would never have dreamed of presuming to sit down in his presence. The futile propertyless gentlemen, the unserviceable and grossly insolent civil servants whom Dickens described, have to be content nowadays with the refuse of middle class employment. They are discontented, unhappy, impecunious, struggling with a false position, borrowing (really begging) from their relatives, and unable to realize, or unwilling to admit, that they have fallen out of the propertied class, not into an intermediate position where they have a monopoly of all the occupations and employments that require a little education and manners, but right down into the ranks of the hungry, without the hardening that makes the hungry life bearable.

And what of the daughters? Their business is to get married; and I can remember the time when there was no other hopeful opening in life for them. When they failed to find husbands, and no special provision had been made for them, they became governesses or school teachers or “companions” or genteel beggars under the general heading of poor relations. They had been carefully trained to feel that it was unladylike to work, and still more unladylike to propose marriage to men. The professions were closed to them. The universities were closed to them. The business offices were closed to them. Their poverty cut them off from propertied society. Their ladylikeness cut them off from the society of working people as poor as themselves, and from inter-marriage with them. Life was a ghastly business for them.

Nowadays, there are far more careers open to women. We have women barristers and women doctors in practice. True, the Church is closed against them, to its own great detriment, as it could easily find picked women, eloquent in the pulpit and capable in parish management, to replace the male refuse it has too often to fall back on; but women can do without ecclesiastical careers now that the secular and civil services are open. The closing of the fighting services is socially necessary, as women are far too valuable to have their lives risked in battle as well as in child-bearing. If ninety out of every hundred young men were killed we could recover from the loss, but if ninety out of every hundred young women were killed there would be an end of the nation. That is why modern war, which is not confined to battle fields, and rains high explosives and poison gas on male and female civilians indiscriminately in their peaceful homes, is so much more dangerous than war has ever been before.

Besides, women are now educated as men are: they go to the universities and to the technical colleges if they can afford it; and, as Domestic Service is now an educational subject with special colleges, a woman can get trained for such an occupation as that of manageress of a hotel as well as for the practice of law or medicine, or for accountancy and actuarial work. In short, nothing now blocks a woman’s way into business or professional life except prejudice, superstition, old-fashioned parents, shyness, snobbery, ignorance of the contemporary world, and all the other imbecilities for which there is no remedy but modern ideas and force of character. Therefore it is no use facing the world today with the ideas of a hundred years ago, when it was practically against the law for a lady who was not a genius to be self-supporting; for if she kept a shop, or even visited at the house of a woman who kept a shop, she was no lady. I know better than you (because I am probably much older) that the tradition of those bad old times still wastes the lives of single gentlewomen to a deplorable extent; but, for all that, every year sees an increase in the activities of gentlewomen outside the home in business and the professions, and even in perilous professional exploration and adventure with a cinematographic camera in attendance.

This increase is hastened by the gigantic scale of capitalist production, which, as we have seen, reduces the old household labor of baking and brewing, spinning and weaving, first to shopping at separate shops, and then to telephoning the day’s orders to one big multiple shop. We have seen also how it leads prematurely to Birth Control, which has reduced the number of children in the middle class households very notably. Many middle-class women who could formerly say with truth that there was no end to a woman’s work in the house are now underworked, in spite of the difficulty of finding servants. It is conceivable that women may drive men out of many middle class occupations as they have already driven them out of many city offices. We are losing the habit of regarding business and the professions as male employments.

Nevertheless males are in a vast majority in these departments, and must remain so as long as our family arrangements last, because the bearing and rearing of children, including domestic housekeeping, is woman’s natural monopoly. As such, being as it is the most vital of all the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that they can attain to in no other profession, and that man cannot attain to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and not to Man: indeed it is the means by which women enslave men, and thus create a Man Question which is called, very inappropriately, the Woman Question. Woman as Wife and Mother stands apart from the development we are dealing with in this chapter, which is, the rise of a business and professional middle class out of the propertied class. This is a sexless development, because when the unmarried daughters, like the younger sons, become doctors, barristers, ministers in the Free Churches, managers, accountants, shopkeepers, and clerks under the term typist (in America stenographer), they virtually leave their sex behind them, as men do. In business and the professions there are neither men nor women: economically they are all neuters, as far as that is humanly possible. The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow in the possibility of getting married. A young woman who regards business employment as only a temporary support until she can find an eligible husband will never master her work as a man must.