"Middle class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... skill, and the boudoir, where Germaine was entertaining envious young friends who came to see her wedding presents. The friends of Germaine were always a little ill at ease in the society of the Duke, belonging as they did to that wealthy middle class which has made France what she is. His indifference to the doings of the old friends of his family saddened them; and they were unable to understand his airy and persistent trifling. It seemed to them a ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... as gods incarnate. They are clothed with all power on earth. When they die, they go to the gods; and rites of worship are instituted for them. That there was a well-ordered and efficient civil administration admits of no doubt. Whether there existed a thrifty middle class or not we can not decide. The tendency was for the child to follow the vocation of the parent, but there were no rigid barriers of caste. Not until the New Empire, was there an attempt to build up such a wall even about ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... commodities adapted to the demand of foreign markets and better able from their superior value, compared with their bulk, to pay the cost of transport by land. Then, and not till then, can we expect to see these territories pay a considerable net surplus revenue to Government, and abound in a middle class of merchants, manufacturers, and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... means the possibility of living like human beings, and of bringing up children to be members of a society better than ours, whilst the "right to work" only means the right to be always a wage-slave, a drudge, ruled over and exploited by the middle class of the future. The right to well-being is the Social Revolution, the right to work means nothing but the Treadmill of Commercialism. It is high time for the worker to assert his right to the common inheritance, and to ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... visit to Alfred, read in the Columbus papers of the different classes of people composing its citizenship. "You have the upper class, the middle class, the lower class." When Uncle Madison was asked if the people of Virginia were not designated by classes, he replied: "No sir! No sir! We only have one class of people in Virginia—the high class. All the ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... as the circumstances of their early life were concerned there was greater similarity between Walton and Pepys, than between either of them and Evelyn. Born in the lower middle class, the son of a tailor in London, and himself afterwards a member of the Clothworkers' guild, Pepys was a true Londoner. His tastes were centred entirely in the town, and his pleasures were never sought either among woods or green fields, or by the banks of trout streams and rivers. ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... also, and that Jahveh, having once determined to have done with the northern kingdom, would turn His wrath against that of the south as well. Micah the Morashtite, a prophet born among the ranks of the middle class, went up and down the land proclaiming misery to be the common lot of the two sister nations sprung from the loins of Jacob, as a punishment for their common errors and weaknesses. "The Lord cometh forth out of His place, and will come and tread upon the high places of the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... commendable energy and marked ability undertaken the task of reviving the old system of every vessel carrying so many apprentices. He is penetrating every part of Great Britain with the information that the Federated Shipowners are prepared to give suitable respectable lads of the poor and middle class a chance to enter the merchant service on terms of which even the poorest boy can avail himself, without pecuniary disability; and I wish the able young manager of the most powerful trade combination in the world all the success he deserves ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... middle links represent those to whom the most liberal Roman Catholic will not impute too much credulity, or the most credulous too much freedom. Perhaps our author should rank with the Bollandists, the first of this middle class; and generally he who thinks with father Papebroke on any subject of ecclesiastical literature, may be sure of thinking right. To those who wholly deny the existence of miracles these sheets are not addressed; but the Roman Catholic may be asked on what principle ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... who are especially well born, are often too jealously guarded, and are, for the most part, kept secluded from the outside gaze, which frequently tends to make their deportment shy and timid. It is those of the middle class, who are much more frequently seen by us, who afford us most chance of studying their character. As for the lower class, it would be almost useless to trouble ourselves ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... integrity of self-respect and reasonable consideration for other peoples' feelings and interests on every point except their dread of losing their own respectability. But when there's a will there's a way. I hate to see dead people walking about: it is unnatural. And our respectable middle class people are all as dead as mutton. Out of the mouth of Mrs Knox I have delivered on them the ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem of the German middle class is only based on the consciousness of being the general representative of the philistine mediocrity of all the ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... to?" I asked him. And he replied: "I have a place for us to lodge in, and a rare good one." And we presently stopped before a small house, evidently belonging to some proprietor of the middle class. It stood on the street, was quite inclosed, and had ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was a mystery to him, yet a mystery that tamed and curbed him. He had never dreamt that such women existed. His own views of women were those of the shopkeeping middle class, practical, selfish, or sensual. But he had been a reader of books; and through Madame de Pastourelles certain sublimities or delicacies of poetry began to seem to him either less fantastic or ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... enforced associations of her previous experience. Think how soon the conditions of her early youth—which, if they afforded no high culture, were at least those of a respected middle class in English provincial life—came to an end, and what they gave place to! Then, on her return to England, how little chance her antecedents and her son's vicious inherited disposition gave her of resuming the position she would have been entitled ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... glared, his cheeks flushed, his voice rose. Could he then have seen the faintest vision of the destiny that future ages had in store for the posterity of the race that now suffered throughout civilised Europe, like him—could he have imagined how, in after years, the 'middle class', despised in his day, was to rise to privilege and power; to hold in its just hands the balance of the prosperity of nations; to crush oppression and regulate rule; to soar in its mighty flight above thrones and principalities, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... on the part of the emperor to induce England to intervene with France in our sad war. The English cabinet, most fortunately, is not unanimously hostile, and Lord John Russell is hesitating. Our friends are the queen and the great middle class of dissenters, and, strange to say, the Lancashire operatives. The aristocracy, the church, finance, and literature are all our enemies, and at home, you know, things are not altogether as one could wish. Just now no general, no, not the President, is of such moment to us as our minister in London. ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... don't understand the country. The people down heah air divided into three classes. Fust thar's the few very rich fam'lies that hev big farms over in the Blue Grass with lots o' niggers ter work 'em. Then thar's the middle class—like the Fortners an' the Brills—thet hev small farms in the creek vallies, an' wharever thar's good land on the mounting sides; who hev no niggers, an' who try ter lead God-fearin', hard-workin' lives, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... firmly established on his Imperial and Royal throne. Opinions varied with regard to the stability of the new regime. The Liberals missed the Republic, and the Royalists the Bourbons. If the army and the people showed confidence in the Emperor's star, the Parisian middle class was always cool, and business men observed with anxiety the hostility of England, Austria, Russia, and possibly Prussia. Paris was gloomy; business was dull; the absence of the court depressed the shop-keepers; the theatres were empty; ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... Shannondale. It was said that Mr. St. Claire and Squire Harrington always wore them to dinner, but they were the nobility par excellence of the town, and were expected to do things differently from the middle class, who had their bread to earn. Old Peterkin, however, whom Frank in his soliloquy, had designated a canal bummer, had become a rich man, and was resolved to show that he knew what was au fait for the occasion; a new ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit. ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... labor, can read and write to some extent. Undoubtedly there is a large number of illiterate and brutal outcasts, who are a standing disgrace to humanity at large, but they can be found in every nation at present. The average intelligence of the middle class in China is, next to Japan, perhaps, the highest among the Asiatic nations. But the greatest evil from which Chinese intellect is suffering is its bombastic antiquarianism. This differs from conservatism, in that it is not the cautious distrust of new institutions for the improvement ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... the light was so dim that it took him at least three minutes more to decipher the missive. Chupin had spent this time in scrutinizing—in appraising the man, as it were. "What is this venerable gentleman doing here?" he thought. "He's a middle class man, that's evident from his linen. He's married—there's a wedding-ring on his finger; he has a daughter, for the ends of his necktie are embroidered. He lives in the neighborhood, for, well dressed as he is, he wears a cap. ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... sacrifice half their serfs and half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But, unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or non-improved, can ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... terrified the middle class of citizens, but gave satisfaction to the great and to the plebeians;—to the latter, because it is their nature to delight in evil; and to the former, by thus seeing themselves avenged of the many wrongs they had suffered from the people. When the duke passed along the streets he was hailed ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... and with all the bully softened out of him; manly first and gentlemanly after, but very soon after; more at home perhaps in the club, the drawing-room, and the hunting-field, in Piccadilly and the Park, than in the farm or shop or market-place; a normal Englishman of the upper middle class, with but one thing abnormal about him, viz., his genius, which was of the kind to give the greater pleasure to the greater number—and yet delight the most fastidious of his day—and I think of ours. One must be very ultra-aesthetic, even now, not ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... influences drawn from the great middle classes of this country, which would be frightened into positive hostility by a purely class organization to which they do not belong. No party could ever hope for success in this country which does not win the confidence of a large portion of this middle class.... ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... Judge, rising as Mr. Sharp sits down, "are noble fellows, and with us. To the middle class-the grocers and shopkeepers-we must, however, hold out flattering inducements; such as the reduction of taxes, the repeal of our oppressive license laws, taking the power out of the hands of our aristocracy-they ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... an assumed name, but it was good enough for the purpose. Protected by the police, she was far enough from Paris to be certain that those who visited her liberally appointed establishment were above the middle class. Everything was strictly regulated in her house and every pleasure was taxed at a reasonable tariff. The prices were six francs for a breakfast with a nymph, twelve for dinner, and twice that sum to spend a whole night. I found the house even better than its reputation, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the human world to-day is the tremendous commercial machine which is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration the smaller and meaner sort of man, the middle class, the average man, "the damned, compact, liberal majority," to use the words of Ibsen, and the world daily becomes "more Chinese". The rocks are fraying one another down to desert sand, and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... he might easily have had his quarters at the consulate; but as usual with American consulates—even to the present time—it was situated in an undesirable part of the town, over a Bierhalle frequented by farmers and the middle class. Having a moderately comfortable income of his own, he naturally preferred living ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... were between persons of the same surname, and exactly half of these were first cousins. In the "English and Irish Peerage" out of 1,989 marriages, 18 or .91 per cent were same-name first cousin marriages. He then sent out about 800 circulars to members of the upper middle class, asking for records of first cousin marriage among the near relatives of the person addressed, and obtained the ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... the last of the fighting the control of affairs had been in the hands of the two committees, one representing the radical revolutionists and the other the middle class and aristocratic Duma. Each committee appealed to its constituency to respect the authority ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... did think of it. But in all her life she had never considered the idea of money-making. That was something for men, and for the middle and lower classes—while Hanging Rock was regarded as most noisomely middle class by fashionable people, it did not so regard itself. Money-making was not for ladies. Like all her class, she was a constant and a severe critic of the women of the lower orders who worked for her as milliners, dressmakers, shop-attendants, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... a small establishment, where Romans, pure blood, of the middle class, and the nobility who did not hang on to foreigners, were to be found. Giuseppina Gassier, who has since sung in America, was prima-donna there, appearing generally ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... implacable destruction a revolutionist can and often must live in the midst of society, feigning to be altogether different from what he really is. A revolutionist must penetrate everywhere: into high society as well as into the middle class, into the shops, into the church, into the palaces of the aristocracy, into the official, military, and literary worlds, into the third section (the secret police), and even ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... in the middle class, with a small stud, never take a swell groom from a great stable—he will despise you and your horses. Hunting farmers and hunting country surgeons train the ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The maire was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its arms and his hands extended in front of him, ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... haw, that will—we can not set aside the great fact that in future our Government will be united in its policy, great in its strength, and no longer impeded by the selfish arrogance of a petty planterdom. Labor and capital are bursting their bonds—the Middle Class of North-America which Southerners and Englishmen equally revile, is becoming all-powerful and seeks to substitute business common-sense for the aristocratic policy which has hitherto guided us. It is no longer a question of radicalism, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to offer her he believed that he could have found happiness in her till the end of his life. Nor, had she loved him, would she have been influenced by worldly considerations. He had seen little of women of the great normal middle class. Conditions had thrown him with the very high or the very low, and experience taught him that the former when unmarried were all angling for husbands, and the latter for patrons. Therefore had he created a world of ideal women—one secret of his popularity, for every woman ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... replied sturdily enough, and Genevieve had blushed prettily; but both felt that it was not exactly proper. Not alone because of the privacy and holiness of the subject, but because of what might have been prudery in the middle class, but which in them was the modesty and reticence found in individuals of the working class when they strive after clean ...
— The Game • Jack London
... leader was discharged from the hospital, he found that his organization had been made illegal, and he himself exiled. Rodriguez went to El Paso, Texas, and immediately, working through Escobar, set about establishing the "Confederation of the Middle Class" to take over now the illegal Gold Shirt work and consolidate the various Mexican fascist groups. Its headquarters was established at 40 Passo ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... are those of what Europeans would call middle-class and not working-class people. This is partly due to the fact that Western men affect a rough dress. Still one may say that the remark so often made, that the masses of the American people correspond to the middle class of Europe, is more true of the women than of the men; and is more true of them, in the rural districts and in the West than it is of the inhabitants of Atlantic cities. I remember to have been dawdling in a book-store in a small town in Oregon ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the minister of the day sent to him often for the important information which the cabinet could not itself command. Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who comprehended the rising importance of the middle class; and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against "the Great Revolution families." Of his qualities in council we have no record; there is reason to believe that his administrative ability was conspicuous: his speeches prove that, if not supreme, he was eminent, in the art of parliamentary ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... overlooking the lake, which lay dark and still beneath the June stars, they all united in a tacit effort to divert her attention. Pliny told a story of some neighbours to illustrate that the same kind of courage existed in the middle class as in the aristocracy. A wife, finding that her husband was wasting away with an incurable disease, not only urged him to end his life, but joined him in the brave adventure, fastening his weakened body to hers and then leaping with him from ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... which I cannot help thinking of sometimes. You will not be at any loss to know that I mean Ireland.' Barry's Works, i. 57. 'Hume,' says Dr. J. H. Burton, 'in his Essay on The Parties of Great Britain (published in 1741), alludes to the absence of a middle class in Scotland, where he says, there are only "two ranks of men, gentlemen who have some fortune and education, and the meanest starving poor; without any considerable number of the middling rank of men, which abounds more in England, both ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... of a turning-point in the century. For the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... in 1859 and afterward, and of the Americans in the Civil War of 1861. There were certainly many noble characters in Russia, and these must have felt deeply the condition of things; but there being no great middle class, and the lower class having been long kept in besotted ignorance, there seemed to be no force on which ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... United States. I think there are not more absolute drunkards here than in our American cities, but the habit of drinking for drink's sake is all but universal. The Aristocracy drink almost to a man; so do the Middle Class; so do the Clergy; so alas! do the Women! There is less of Ardent Spirits imbibed than with us; but Wines are much cheaper and in very general use among the well-off; while the consumption of Ale, Beer, Porter, &c. (mainly by the Poor) is enormous. Only think of L5,000,000 ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... separate worlds. This one belongs to the people who have to shoulder the load of everything, and the other is a world of villains, robbers, idiots, and fools. Really, it is difficult to find anything so vile, so inept, and so useless as a Spanish politician. The Spanish middle class is a warren of rogues and villains. I feel an enormous repugnance to brushing against it. That is why I came here now and then to talk to these people; not because these are good, no; the first and the last of them are riff-raff, but ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... necessary for economic reasons found in over-population and over-production, the need of markets and outlets"; the great bourgeoisie, "which also has its reasons of a social nature—the upper middle class being no less affected than the nobility by the democratization of Germany ... and, finally, the gun and armour-plate manufacturers, the great merchants who clamour for greater markets, and the bankers who speculate on the Golden Age ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... little one, and evidently do not know that we are swimming in the full tide of democracy. But, if you wish to see this place free from any mingling of the middle class, come in the morning, and then you will find only the fine ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... period were the habituees of the night restaurants paid for their witchery. Now Glory was tossing into his arms ladies of high position but with an unconfessable past, anxious for novelties although exceedingly mature. This middle class woman who would advance so confidently toward him and then retreat with such capricious outbursts of modesty, was a ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and bayonets, and pikes, and deluges of blood, and awful slaughter. To this expectation many added the hope of seeing a complete revolution effected—a revolution which would overthrow throne, aristocracy, and middle class, leaving the people and the republic triumphant. So deeply had this hope taken possession of the more sanguine, that they could not bear to hear the slightest doubt ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... middle of the nineteenth century art had been regarded as a luxury for the rich dilettante,—the people heard little of it, and thought less. The utensils and furniture of the middle class were fashioned only with a view to utility; there was a popular belief that beautiful things were expensive, and the thrifty housekeeper who had no money to put into bric-a-brac never thought of ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... to give a complete notion of our household, so far as it may be honestly set down, I will add that the domestics were three. Two of them, the cook and the housemaid, were German Swiss, of middle class, who had taken service to earn what money they could, but mainly to learn French, after the custom of their country, where the young people of a French or Italian canton would in like manner resort to a ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells
... fashionable. There was a single lamp stationed at the mouth of the narrow little street. As we advanced, I could see outlined upon our right, just beyond a narrow pavement of brick, a low and not more than semi-respectable house, or rather, row of houses; tenements for the middle class or poor, I might have said. The neighborhood, I knew from my acquaintance with the city, was respectable enough, yet it was remote, and occupied by none of any station. Certainly it was not to be considered fit residence for a woman ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... intelligence and education, and still more in moral qualities. So that nowadays the wealthy class and men at the head of government do not constitute, as they did in former days, the ELITE of society; on the contrary, they are inferior to the middle class. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... Government, but hanker after Free Trade, not understanding that the two things are self-contradictory. Of course, if they were a united political force they could swamp us, but they are disunited both in their interests and geographically. The interests of the poorer and middle class peasants are in contradiction to those of the rich peasant farmer who employs laborers. The poorer and middle class see that we support them against the rich peasant, and also see that he is ready to support what is obviously not in their interests." I said, "If ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... struggles of this epoch, Europe owes whatever liberty and free government its peoples now enjoy. At the close of this period national power was no longer in the hands of the aristocracy, nor in those of kings; it had passed into the third social stratum, variously designated as the middle class, the burghers or bourgeoisie, and the third estate, a body of men as little willing to share it with the masses as the kings had been. Nevertheless, the transition once begun could not be stopped, and the advance of manhood suffrage ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... few of us—they called us 'the middle class'—who urged equality. We wanted a government in which all classes were represented fairly; what we called a democracy. Once the experiment was started, but ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... point for settlers coming to the Platte. With the instinct born of his Western life, Jim made for the big horse corral, which is always on the outskirts of a prairie town and where he knew he could pass a pleasant hour or more. It was, as usual, crowded with horses of low and middle class degree—some old and worn, some young and raw, many extraordinary pintos, one or two mounts above the average of size or beauty, but nothing to ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... seek the law-courts on the smallest provocation, idealist to the extent of preferring a simple country life to all the glamour of London, a man seemingly endowed with all the ambitions of the most sober and unimaginative middle class—truly he ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his office;—a thousand times better chance for happiness, education, employment, security from temptation. A few years since the profession of arms was the only one which our nobles could follow. The Church, the Bar, medicine, literature, the arts, commerce, were below them. It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England: the working educated men, away from Lord North's bribery in the senate; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by hopes of preferment; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence; the painters pursuing their ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and who managed, in 1866, to wreck Lord John Russell's Reform Bill in the House. But Bright had his revenge in the country. Such meetings as ensued in the great provincial towns had not been seen for twenty years: the middle class and the artisans were fused as in the great Repeal struggle of 1846. At Glasgow as many as 150,000 men paraded outside the town, and no hall could contain the thousands who wished to hear the great Tribune. He claimed that eighty-four per cent. of his countrymen were still excluded from ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... say he has dined. Any one who has a lean pocket-book need not dream of wine in Holland, for it is frightfully dear; but, as the people's purses there are generally well filled, nearly all the Dutch, from the middle class up, drink wine, and there are few other countries where there is so great an abundance and variety of foreign wines, particularly of those from French and ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... stand face to face with it for some time. Those who call upon me here are seldom Plague-stricken. They come for other ailments, or because they feel unwell, and are nervous lest it should be the beginning of an attack; but of late I have had very few come here. My patients are mostly of the middle class, and these have either fled or fallen victims to the Plague, or have shut themselves up in their houses like fortresses, and nothing would tempt them to issue abroad. Therefore, I expect that I shall have naught to do but to gain strength again. Come here when you will, lad, and the oftener the ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... regarding his darkened and disheartening shop; he thought of his former landlord and his present landlord, and of the general disgustingness of business in an age which re-echoes to The Bitter Cry of the Middle Class; and then it seemed to him that afar off he heard the twankle, twankle of a banjo, and the voice of a stranded siren singing. He had a sense of hot sunshine upon sand, of the children of at least transiently opulent holiday makers in a circle round about him, of the whisper, ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father and grandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his whole family would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middle class—the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious in them, the class to which poetry is a luxury, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... School.— N. school, academy, university, alma mater, college, seminary, Lyceum; institute, institution; palaestra, Gymnasium, class, seminar. day school, boarding school, preparatory school, primary school, infant school, dame's school, grammar school, middle class school, Board school, denominational school, National school, British and Foreign school, collegiate school, art school, continuation school, convent school, County Council school, government school, grant-in-aid school, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... standing against the walls, hanging pictures of the kind called in Japan kakemono, and rich bronzes and fine pieces of porcelain on ebony brackets. At night, when these rooms are lighted up with eight or ten massive lamps, the appearance is splendid. These are the houses of Chinese merchants of the middle class. ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... on you is any guide, I should do nowt of kind. I'm a decent-minded man. I'm Hobson. I'm British middle class and proud of it. I stand for common sense and sincerity. You're affected, which is bad sense and insincerity. You've overstepped nice dressing and you've tried grand dressing— (VICKEY sits)—which is the occupation of fools and such as have no brains. You forget the majesty ...
— Hobson's Choice • Harold Brighouse
... Chief of Police in Moscow I was received by his successor in the same place where the assassination had occurred. He did not take the slightest precaution with me, whom he did not know at all, nor with men of the middle class who came to present their petitions, in spite of the fact that it was under precisely identical conditions that his predecessor had been slain. Before I left I looked over to where on the floor there had so recently occurred such agony. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... distinction, unique and preeminent. What was more natural, then, than that their allegiance should be divided; the so-called fashionable set adhering to the crown; the common townsfolk, the majority of whom were refugees from an obnoxious autocracy, zealously espousing the colonists' cause, and the middle class, who were comprised of those families holding a more or less neutral position in the war, and who were willing to preserve their estates and possessions, remaining undecided, and in their manner maintaining good offices with both sides ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... three-year recession thanks to strong demand in EU export markets. Despite the global slowdown in 2001-02, strong domestic activity in construction, agriculture, and consumption have kept GDP growth above 4%. However, macroeconomic gains have only recently started to spur creation of a middle class and address Romania's widespread poverty, while corruption and red tape continue to handicap the business environment. Romanian government confidence in continuing disinflation was underscored by its currency revaluation in 2005, making 10,000 ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the Universities not long ago, and was now charged with the reformation of society. In connection with the rest of the group of very able young men he had drawn up a scheme for the education of labor, for the amalgamation of the middle class and the working class, and for a joint assault of the two bodies, combined in the Society for the Education of Democracy, upon Capital. The scheme had already reached the stage in which it was permissible to hire an office and engage a secretary, ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... said, 'I have few thoughts to communicate at present, Herr Professor. My German will fail me as soon as I quit common ground. I love my country, and I do not reckon it as perfect. We are swillers, possibly gluttons; we have a large prosperous middle class; many good men are ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... strain of alliterative classification, Mrs. Schum's boarding house might have been indexed as Middle West, middle class, medium price, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... endeavours. I may be mistaken in some particulars; for general rules, founded on the soundest reason, demand individual modification; but, if I can persuade any of the rising generation to exercise their reason on this head, I am content. My advice will probably be found most useful to mothers in the middle class; and it is from them that the lower imperceptibly gains improvement. Custom, produced by reason in one, may safely be the effect of imitation in the other.— — — — — — ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... gold, cut to represent the leaves of a plant. As the hand moves, these ornaments play about the finger, and a very brilliant effect might be produced if diamonds were used in the pendants. Fig. 196 is the ring commonly worn by the middle class Egyptian men. They are usually of silver, set with mineral stones, and are valued as the manufacture of the silversmiths of Mecca, that sacred city being supposed to exert a holy influence on all the ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... order. Suffice it to say that it formed the capital fund of the government which exhausted it, and when the source of supply was destroyed, production ceased, and with it, of course, all means of governmental support. Where the extinction of this "middle class" touches the point of our inquiry is in affording an explanation of a circumstance in the history of the Lombard subjugation of the Italian towns, which without consideration of this fact would appear almost incomprehensible. I refer to the utter passivity of the inhabitants, not ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... verses, the result in both cases being, as a rule, hideous and artificial doggrel. The little book, Wee Macgregor, written in what may be called the Scotch Cockney dialect, was a brave and amusing attempt to phonograph the talk of a Glasgow boy of the lower middle class. The unlovely speech employed by the author is, happily, quite unlike the careful and deliberate speech of the educated citizen of Glasgow or Paisley. The main differences between the educated Scot and the educated Englishman are that the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... were poor gentlefolks; not young; solitary, sensitive, and although they did not know it, proud. They both belonged to what is called the Middle Class, and there was this further resemblance between them that they each descended from families which had been more than well-to-do in the eighteenth century, and had gradually sunken in fortune. In both houses there had been a decay of energy which had ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... have an instinctive feeling that their cause is bound up in the prosperity of the States,—the United States. It is true that they have not a particle of power in the direct form of a vote; but when millions in this country are led by the religious middle class, they can go and prevent the governing class from pursuing a policy hostile to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... Wholesale merchants, and their men—people with small banking accounts and much integrity—rogues and catspaws, clerks old and young, sheriffs' clerks, barristers' clerks, solicitors' clerks; in fine, all the working, thinking, and speculating members of that lower middle class which honeycombs the interests of Paris and watches over its granary, accumulates the coin, stores the products that the proletariat have made, preserves the fruits of the South, the fishes, the wine from every sun-favored hill; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... country in which the old feudal organisation continued, so far as it generally affected the people, more vigorous than in any other part of civilised Europe. Elsewhere, the growth of trade and of large towns had created a middle class, with an organisation of their own, independent of the lords. In Scotland, the towns were still scanty and poor; such as they were, they were for the most part under the control of the great nobleman who happened to live ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... rank are always confined to their apartments from motives of jealousy; those of a middle class are a kind of upper servants deprived of liberty; and the wives of the lower orders are mere domestic drudges. The handsomest women are usually purchased for the courts and ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... character, and by its means to read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was comic power. In his most celebrated piece, Le Glorieux, he returns to the theme treated by Dancourt of the struggle between the ruined noblesse and the aspiring middle class. Pathos and something of romance are ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... very unjustly disliked people of the bourgeois type—the respectable middle class, quorum pars magna fui! Especially if we were very well off and successful, and thought ourselves of some consequence (as we now very often are, I beg to say), and showed it (as, I'm afraid, we sometimes do). He preferred the commonest artisan to M. Jourdain, the bourgeois gentilhomme, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... international payment obligations without rescheduling its debt. Production, trade, and investment reforms since 1991 have provided new opportunities for Indian businessmen and an estimated 200 million plus middle class consumers. New Delhi has always paid its foreign debts on schedule and has stimulated exports, attracted foreign investment, and revived confidence in India's economic prospects. GDP growth in 1992-95 has averaged nearly 5%. Most of the country's external fundamentals - including the ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "Gold and the Proletariate," or whatever it is; just tell our readers all about it. As to the leader, say what you like in it—of course I shall look over the proof, and tone it down a bit to suit the taste of our public—we appeal mainly to the mercantile middle class, I need hardly say; but you know the general policy of the paper, and you can just write what you think best, subject to subsequent editorial revision. Get to work at once, please, as the articles are wanted immediately, and send ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... order to exhibit a connected, reasonable affair, not only of a man and his wife prosperously seated in the mean of things, nel mezzo del cammin in space as well as time—for the Macartneys belonged to the middle class, and were well on to the middle of life themselves—, but of stript, quivering and winged souls tiptoe within them, tiptoe for flight into diviner spaces than any seemly bodies can afford them. As you peruse you may ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... surface of society, London wears its most radiant smile; when shops are gayest, and trade most brisk; when down the thoroughfares roll and glitter the countless streams of indolent and voluptuous life; when the upper class spend, and the middle class make; when the ball-room is the Market of Beauty, and the club-house the School for Scandal; when the hells yawn for their prey, and opera-singers and fiddlers—creatures hatched from gold, as the dung-flies from the dung-swarm, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Movement, but, important as that was and is, in its earlier years it was almost entirely confined to clerical circles, exercising comparatively little influence on the laity and practically none at all on that great middle class which had been so much affected by the Wesleys, Whitefield, Scott, Newton, and the other pundits of Evangelicanism. Take the characteristic novel of the movement, if novel it should be called, Newman's Loss ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... weaknesses which disturb the calm, or shake the resolution, of chastity and courage in a modern novel. Scott lived in a country and time, when, from highest to lowest, but chiefly in that dignified and nobly severe[47] middle class to which he himself belonged, a habit of serene and stainless thought was as natural to the people as their mountain air. Women like Rose Bradwardine and Ailie Dinmont were the grace and guard of almost every household (God be praised that the race of them is not yet extinct, for all that Mall ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Beled" (figs. 188, 191), we descend several degrees in the social scale. Raemka was a "superintendent of works," which probably means that he was an overseer of corvee labour at the time of building the great pyramids. He belonged to the middle class; and his whole person expresses vulgar contentment and self-satisfaction. We seem to see him in the act of watching his workmen, his staff of acacia wood in his hand. The feet of the statue had perished, but have been restored. The body is stout and heavy, and the neck thick. The head ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... the more private entrances of the Park, I had an opportunity of observing the people we had served. They were very respectable in appearance; but I knew enough of the world to see that they belonged to what is called the middle class in England. I thought the man might be a soldier; while the two females had an air of great respectability, though not in the least of fashion. The girl appeared to be nearly as old as myself, and was decidedly pretty. ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... pit or boxes. He would, indeed, have repudiated the maxim: "Everything for the people, and nothing by the people"; he was fully prepared to place the house of commons in the hands of the people, or at least of the great middle class, but he regarded the crown and the house of lords as almost equal powers, and he never doubted that property and education would practically continue to rule ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... considerable shrewdness. The town fairly smelt of respectability; the tree-shaded streets, the children in socks and small crisp-laundered garments, the houses set back, each in its square of shaved lawn, all peaceful, middle class and unexciting. The last town in the world for Judson Clark, the last profession, the last house, this shabby old brick ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... troubled face, His furniture was commonplace— The sort of Peer who well might pass For someone of the middle class. I do not think you want to hear About this unimportant Peer, So let us leave him to discourse About LORD ...
— More Peers Verses • Hilaire Belloc
... all probability, a Tagalog oligarchy would be formed; for the capital, Manila, is Tagalog, the adjacent provinces are Tagalog, the wealthy class of the Islands on the whole is Tagalog, and there is no middle class anywhere. The mere fact that the capital is situated in the Tagalog provinces would perhaps alone determine the issue, apart from the fact that the Tagalogs are the dominant element, of the native ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox
... introduced to Madame Planterre and her daughters, bright, pretty young ladies, who seemed much attached to their parents. They gave me a very pleasant idea of a French family of the upper middle class. ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... M. Bonaparte, what is it? This, socialism? I deny it. Hatred of the middle class it may be, but not socialism. Look at the socialist department par excellence, the Department of Agriculture and of Commerce,—he has abolished it. What has he given you as compensation? the Ministry of Police! The other socialist department ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... being as yet novices in politics, naturally were more strongly impressed with that aspect of the democratic upheaval which emphasized the rights of man in general and social equality in particular. If the middle class Jacksonian was probably thinking first of reducing the debt on his farm or perchance of getting a political office, and only as an after-thought proceeding to look for a justification in the Declaration of Independence, as yet the wage earner was ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... into the hall and finds waiting for him a throng of visitors known as his "clients" or dependants. The position of these persons is somewhat remarkable. They are commonly free Roman citizens of the "genteel" middle class, who openly admit that they depend for the bulk of their living upon the patronage of the noble or the rich. The custom arose from a very old condition of things, under which certain classes of citizens, not being entitled to appear in ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... into this matter. What do the higher schools, those to which the great middle class of the country sends its children, teach, over and above the instruction given in the primary schools? There is a little more reading and writing of English. But, for all that, every one knows that it is a rare thing to find a boy of the middle or upper classes who can read aloud decently, ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... pretension to rank or standing, other than that which honesty may give him, can do the same. His wife's fortune will consist in the labour of her hands, and in her ability to assist him in his home. But between these there is a middle class of men, who, by reason of their education, are peculiarly susceptible to the charms of womanhood, but who literally cannot marry for love, because their earnings will do no more than support themselves. As to this special ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... no fewer than 18,000 of his own. This vast addition was not only quite out of proportion but also quite out of tone with the original work. Jean de Meung abandoned entirely the refined and aristocratic atmosphere of his predecessor, and wrote with all the realism and coarseness of the middle class of that day. Lorris's vapid allegory faded into insignificance, becoming a mere peg for a huge mass of extraordinarily varied discourse. The whole of the scholastic learning of the Middle Ages is poured in a confused stream through this remarkable and deeply interesting ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... liberality in the matter of ex-barmaids and chorus girls. The Wicked Nobleman was a somewhat reckless character in his way, but his feats would not bear comparison with those performed by many and many a young fellow who belongs to the wealthy middle class. Alas! for that splendid middle class which once represented all that was sober and steady and trustworthy in Britain! Go into any smart billiard-room nowadays, or make a round of the various race meetings, and you will see something to make you sad. ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... peninsula. The difference of climate, the vicinity of foreigners, the traces of invasions, may have modified the type, altered the accent, and slightly varied the language; still the Italians are the same everywhere, and the middle class—the elite of every people—think and speak alike from Turin to Naples. Handsome, robust, and healthy, when the neglect of Governments has not delivered them over to the fatal malaria, the Italians are, mentally, the most richly endowed people in Europe. M. de Rayneval, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... while preserving and increasing the idea of choice. We make basic health insurance affordable for all low-income people not now covered. We do it by providing a health-insurance tax credit of up to $3750 for each low-income family. The middle class gets help, too. And by reforming the health insurance market, my plan assures that Americans will have access to basic health insurance even if they change jobs or develop serious health problem We must bring ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... cause. This responsibility and the weight of the taxes themselves ruined so many landowners that the government was forced to decree that no one should desert his estates in order to escape the exactions. Only the very rich could stand the drain on their resources. The middle class sank into poverty and despair, and in this way the Empire lost just that prosperous class of citizens who should have been ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... the English people were abundantly able to take care of themselves. A noted French writer said of them that they resembled a barrel of their own beer, froth at the top, dregs at the bottom, but thoroughly sound and wholesome in the middle. It was this middle class, with their solid practical good sense, that ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... settlers of the middle class were usually dressed in hard wearing, rough clothes made of homespun material, with a slightly better (and perhaps more colorful) costume for Sunday and holiday wear. In 1622 each Englishman who planned to emigrate to Jamestown was advised to supply ...
— New Discoveries at Jamestown - Site of the First Successful English Settlement in America • John L. Cotter
... others, observed this joy, this smiling depression of these people of the middle class, and in her heart there was savage laughter; all her being jeered, but her face maintained its frigid rigidity. Ah! how she deceived these worthy people, and how delighted she was to deceive them with such triumphant impudence. Her sweetheart, ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... enough to ignore them," answered her cousin Cora, "and I shall do it with a vengeance. It is one thing to be nice and friendly with shopgirls and factory hands, and quite another to take up with the well-to-do middle class. Give them an inch and they'll take an ell every time. First thing you know they'll turn round ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... tar-smoke with which it seemed to be perfectly soaked, as a sponge is with water. It caused Agnes to cough violently and continuously until she arrived at her new destination, which was a private dwelling-house, apparently the abode of some one belonging to the middle class ...
— Angel Agnes - The Heroine of the Yellow Fever Plague in Shreveport • Wesley Bradshaw
... uninviting—after a day's hard work. Glorious independence! No wonder that hundreds of girls are so willing to accept the first offer of marriage, sick and tired of their independence behind the counter, or at the sewing or typewriting machine. They are just as ready to marry as girls of middle class people who long to throw off the yoke of parental dependence. A so-called independence which leads only to earning the merest subsistence is not so enticing, not so ideal that one can expect woman to sacrifice ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... belong to the hated class for the moment, though at least we try to emulate tourist virtues, if there are any, and avoid tourist vices, which is next to impossible, as they are the fruit of the tour itself. It is the circular tour which, in its effect upon the great middle class, is the most virulent and contagious, and which breeds the most offensive habits of thought and speech. The circular tour is a magnificent idea, a praiseworthy business scheme; it has educated the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... The Mexican upper and middle class share the general Spanish-American characteristic of preference for life in their cities. Expeditions into the country are matters to be avoided if possible. The gilded youth of the capital and members of polite society generally, do not like to leave the ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... scepticism had given no warning of a volcanic explosion in this direction. The current literature of 1865 was much more prudish and less outspoken than it is at the present day; the gentlemanly licentiousness of Byron's time had been completely suppressed; the moral tone of the middle class was still outwardly Puritanic. English folk were by no means prepared to rebuild the altars of the primitive deities who presided over man's unquenchable desire, or to be otherwise than somewhat aghast at the invocations of Astarte or Ashtaroth, or the cry to Our ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... dwellings of the English peasant and artisan. The Editor of the London Non-Conformist, speaking of this movement of Mr. Sturge, says: "The Declaration is put forth by a man, who, perhaps, in a higher degree than any other individual, has the confidence of both the middle class and the working men. The former can trust to his prudence; the latter ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... and strengthen the language in order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class. Divorced from reality, with its activities all fettered in baby-linen, our literature has atrophied and dwindled into a babble of nursery rhymes, tragedies of Little Marys, tales of Babes in a Wood. The example of Shakespeare may yet teach us the value of free speech; he could say what he liked ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... general, though intended by the constitution as a kind of barrier between the prince and the people, are the greatest oppressors of the latter, who have seldom any means of redress, or of conveying their complaints to the Imperial ear. There is no middle class of men in China: men whose property and ideas of independence give them weight in the part of the country where they reside; and whose influence and interest are considered as not below the notice ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... both get on without me this morning," she said, with a faint smile. "I must go to that girl, for she needs someone besides Timmie, and Timmie needs rest." At the door she hesitated. "Have I not told you, brother John, that the middle class is our country's safeguard?—that we would be in a sorry ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... France comprised on the one hand a small elite and on the other a great unlettered mass. There was no middle class between. Yet the population of the colony always contained, especially among its officials and clergy, a sprinkling of educated and scholarly men. These have given us a literature of travel and description which is extensive ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... large number of men spent a half, and even three-quarters of their earnings in drink. The middle class spent proportionately far less on liquor, and far more upon display of one kind and another; they seldom denied themselves anything which they could possibly obtain. The rich, as a class, lived in and for indulgence, in some cases refined and subtle, in others gross; but always indulgence. The ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... salary of less than L400 will not enable more than two children to be given such chance of development as every parent reasonably desires. It is pertinent to ask here what is the average number of children in the families of the British middle class—which is mainly the stratum from which our legislators, rulers, and magistrates have been drawn. Do such people breed freely? Self-respecting parents prefer to do without such Government help ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... sought to degrade. The third estate in France was divided into the bourgeoisie and the peasantry and small artisans. The former gradually deteriorated in character and tended toward the condition of the lowest classes. By the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, a large number of the bourgeoisie, or middle class, was driven from France. This deprived France of the class that would have stood by the nation when it needed support, and would have stood for moderate constitutional government against the radical democrats ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... suggested. People in the middle class of life always assume that you are a "Mr." I ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... was very busy. The strictness of his morals furnished such buffoons as Peter Pindar and Captain Morris with an inexhaustible theme for merriment of no very delicate kind. But the great body of the middle class of Englishmen could not see the joke. They warmly praised the young statesman for commanding his passions, and for covering his frailties, if he had frailties, with decorous obscurity, and would have been very far indeed from thinking better of him if he had vindicated ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... consciousness of independence, which was fatal to that strict subordination which ought to be maintained and enforced. Non-commissioned officers were the principal actors in this department, and being connected by the ties of common interest, they formed a combination which interfered with the middle class of inhabitants, since they could get on board any vessels on account of their rank, which gave them the privilege of doing so, without being under the necessity of obtaining a written pass for that purpose. The principle of allowing a servant to enter into traffic, ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... to the revolt and running riot over the country; but there is, nevertheless, in Mexico a class of people as educated, as refined, as honorable as those existing anywhere. And these people—the obreros (skilled working men) and the professional middle class, as well as the better elements of the laboring classes, are supporting Madero—not all in the spirit of his personal adherents, but because they realize the tremendous peril to Mexico of continued revolution. In 1911 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... woman, all those in short for whom the strictly necessary includes a certain number of domestics and equipages, as well as several town and country houses. Further on flourishes the rich upper middle class, with its own standards and life. In other regions we find men of ample, moderate, or small means, and very unlike exigencies. Then come the people—artisans, day-laborers, peasants, in short, the masses, who live dense and serried ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... magnificent streets in which civilization displays all its marvels, you seek in vain for some fissure by which to introduce yourself into English society, which is thickly steeped in individualism. With letters of recommendation, if of high authority, you may, it is true, gain access to a family of the middle class; and, once received, you will be well treated. But what conditions you must fulfill to gain that! You must lead a life like that of the cloister, and sacrifice all your dearest habits. The Englishman, though he invented the word eccentric, does not tolerate ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class." ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... otherwise untouched by railways; indeed many of the villages in the interior can only be approached by paths; and this is one of the causes of the economic difficulties of Calabria. Another is the unequal distribution of wealth, there being practically no middle class; a third is the injudicious disforestation which has been carried on without regard to the future. The natural check upon torrents is thus removed, and they sometimes do great damage. The Calabrian costumes are still much worn in the remoter ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... during her passage from childhood to womanhood. The great book of human nature was turned over before her. Her father's social position was very peculiar. He belonged in fortune and station to the middle class. His daughters seem to have been suffered to mix freely with those whom butlers and waiting-maids call vulgar. We are told that they were in the habit of playing with the children of a wig-maker who lived in the adjoining house. Yet few nobles could assemble in the most stately ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... coupled with increased realization of his own possibilities and powers as well as of his limitations. In all but a very few of his plays, he has confined himself to the life immediately surrounding him—to the life of the Viennese middle class, and more particularly of the professional element to which he himself belongs. But on the basis of a wonderfully faithful portrayal of local characters and conditions, he has managed to rear a superstructure of emotional appeal and intellectual clarification that ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... property was at its height in the Athenian republic. "The inhabitants of Attica were divided among themselves as to the form of government. Those who lived on the mountains (the poor) preferred the popular form; those of the plain (the middle class), the oligarchs; those by the sea coast, a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. Other dissensions were arising from the inequality of fortunes. The mutual antagonism of the rich and poor had become so violent, that the one-man power seemed the only safe-guard ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... stout-hearted men (chiefly machine-gunners), who could be depended on to fight to the last; men who did not intend to fight, and did intend to put up their hands on the first occasion; and, thirdly, the 'great middle class,' who were prepared to do their duty, and had a sense of discipline, but who could not be classed as heroes.... It was they who came to consider that when tanks arrived, 'there was ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... genius took afterwards most delight in. Of course there are inequalities in it, and some things that would have been better away; but it is a book that might have stood its ground, even if it had stood alone, as containing unusually truthful observation of a sort of life between the middle class and the low, which, having few attractions for bookish observers, was quite unhackneyed ground. It had otherwise also the very special merit of being in no respect bookish or commonplace in its descriptions ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... suffragists are members of the radical, the moderate (we should say conservative), and the clerical parties. These women are middle class, average, intelligent wives and mothers. They correspond fairly well with the women of the General Federation of Clubs in the United States, and like the American club women they are affiliated with the International Council of Women. ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... be admitted into the school at Mt. Holyoke, where the course of instruction embraces three years, and three classes, Junior, Middle, and Senior. Rose, who had been much flattered on account of her scholarship, confidently expected to enter the Middle class. Jenny, too, had the same desire, though she confessed to some misgivings concerning her knowledge of a goodly number of the necessary branches. Ida was really an excellent scholar, and was prepared to enter the Senior class, while Mary aspired ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... it were a music-hall; and an agent of some sort from Manchester who had reached that stage of prosperity at which he was beginning to wonder whether, after all, Nonconformity was not a grievous heresy and the Church of England a sure means of salvation. And there were others, vague people of the middle class, kindly and comfortable and inarticulate, with no particular opinions on anything except the desirability of four good meals every day and a month's holiday in the summer. There were daughters, too ... all sorts and conditions of daughters! Some that were hearty ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... up in packets. Many expressed to the philosopher and his wife their joy at hearing that their daughter had decided to leave a career so ... so very ... in which ... in fact that...! Every absurd prejudice, so puritanly ingrained in the minds of most middle class divisions and sections and even amongst the more cultivated, was endlessly repeated upon with the usual banalities in the large correspondence of their friends and others. Poor actors, so misunderstood! so misrepresented! The philosopher showed all the letters to Esperance, ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... Defoe was a member of the mercantile middle class. He was a Dissenter and his political and economic sympathies generally coincided with those of the moderate Whigs. A limited monarchy, the destruction of France's commercial empire, liberty of conscience ...
— Atalantis Major • Daniel Defoe
... almost all filled by them.[5] Another family, that of Boethus, alternated, it is true, with that of Hanan's in the pontificate.[6] But the Boethusim, whose fortunes were of not very honorable origin, were much less esteemed by the pious middle class. Hanan was then in reality the chief of the priestly party. Kaiapha did nothing without him; it was customary to associate their names, and that of Hanan was always put first.[7] It will be understood, in ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... of prosperity and comfort. Though it has few streets of shops, it covers a great extent of ground with streets and lanes of pretty, isolated dwelling-houses, surrounded by trees, gardens, and well-trimmed hedges, each garden entered by a substantial gateway. The existence of something like a middle class with home privacy and home life is suggested by these miles of comfortable "suburban residences." Foreign influence is hardly at all felt, there is not a single foreigner in Government or any other employment, and even the hospital was ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird |
