"Middle class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bellamont requires all our energies. I hope you will accompany me; and, indeed, we must muster all our forces. It is not to be denied that there is a want, not only of genius, but of men, in our art. The cooks are like the civil engineers: since the middle class have taken to giving dinners, the demand exceeds ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... of Bulgaria in this generation of the nation's life—a misfortune which is being rapidly repaired—is that she has no middle class: and no class with any "tradition" of leadership behind it. There are the peasants—admirable material for nation-making—heroic, thrifty, moral, industrious, practical. Above the peasants there is no class from which to draw a good supply of competent administrators, ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... much beautiful carved wood about it, but the houses are kept so dark on account of the heat and flies, that one can hardly see well enough to appreciate these beauties. Excepting in this respect, and the amount of carved wood, the style is very like the houses of the middle class of ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... say, Count. Youre going to say that the whole thing seems to you to be quite new and unusual and original. The naval lieutenant is a Frenchman who cracks up the English and runs down the French: the hackneyed old Shaw touch. The characters are second-rate middle class, instead of being dukes and millionaires. The heroine gets kicked through the mud: real mud. Theres no plot. All the old stage conventions and puppets without the old ingenuity and the old enjoyment. And a feeble air of intellectual pretentiousness kept up all through to persuade you ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... undisputed fact; but in the light of what Mrs. Rexford had just said of her daughter's good-heartedness all assumed a different aspect. Mrs. Brown was in no way "highly connected," belonging merely to the prosperous middle class, but, with the true colonial spirit that recognises only distance below, none above, she began to consider whether, in the future, her role should not be that of mere kindness also. To do her justice, she did not decide ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... matter for those who like studying statistics and chance to find out what proportion in England of sweet-tempered, timid women of the medium-middle class, in newly-sprouted families, with immense fortunes, do not marry men who only want their money. Such heiresses are the natural food of the noble shark and the swell sucker, and even a gypsy knows it, and can read them at a glance. I explained this to the lady; but ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... 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 to had ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... cruisers, one hundred and forty-five destroyers, eighty torpedo boats, and thirty-eight submarines. Under the direction of Von Tirpitz the navy had become democratic and had drawn to it many able men of the middle class. Its training was highly specialized and the officers were enthusiasts in their profession. The navy of Austria-Hungary had also expanded in recent years under the inspiration of Admiral Montecuculi. At the outbreak of the war the fleet comprised sixteen battleships, two armored ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... is a man of inordinate modesty, and as he is quite likely to read these words, I can say but little about him. Perhaps the statement of a member of the upper middle class upon his return from a visit to the "office" will serve to throw some light on his character, ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... many more," he sighed, "and, alas! this is an age of majorities. People talk a good deal. I wonder how many of your hateful middle class would give up a tithe of their luxuries to add to the welfare of the others. There isn't a person breathing with so little real feeling for the slaves of the world, as your middle-class manufacturer, your tradesman. That is why, in the days to ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... intelligent woman of the middle class, whose business brought her in daily contact with the young lady, and she had thus formed a correct opinion ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... without any addition from farther taxes, it is wholly impossible that any landowner who does not possess enormous tracts of country, or vast funded or moneyed property in addition to his territorial possessions, can avoid insolvency. What the effect of the total destruction of the middle class of British landholders must be on the balance of the constitution, and the state of society in these islands, it is not our present purpose to inquire. Suffice it to say, that it is precisely the state of things which signalised ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... soldier. He stands there boldly unruffled and more than life size, with a shadowy army of tiny little figures winding off into the landscape behind. Nor it seems are great men oblivious to these expectations. M. de Pierrefeu tells of a photographer's visit to Joffre. The General was in his "middle class office, before the worktable without papers, where he sat down to write his signature. Suddenly it was noticed that there were no maps on the walls. But since according to popular ideas it is not possible ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... 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 ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... as yet little has been done to ameliorate this degradation. Ignorance prevails everywhere. Even of the young people of the peasant class more than eighty per cent. can neither read nor write. There is no middle class. The gulf between the upper class and the lower is so wide as to be absolutely impassable. And for the most part the upper class is quite content to have this state ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... la Bourdaisiere, to which France was once indebted for some of her eminent ecclesiastics and statesmen, but at the period of the birth of her holy child, she ranked—like the royally descended Virgin of Juda at the birth of Christ—only among other obscure individuals of the middle class. ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... bread or meat, nor have they laid any increased burden upon comforts like tea and sugar. There is nothing in these taxes which makes it harder for a labouring man to keep up his strength or for the small man of the middle class to maintain his style of living. There is nothing in these taxes which makes it more difficult for any hard-working person, whether he works with his hands or his head, to keep a home together in decent comfort. No impediment has been placed by these taxes ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... 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 ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... conceived would fit his needs, and an ambition. This last was nothing less than to strike it rich and set himself up among the eminently bourgeois of London. It seemed that the situation of the wealthy English middle class, with just enough gentility above to aspire to, and sufficient smaller fry to bully and patronize, appealed to his imagination, though of course he did not put it so crudely as that. It was no news to me then, two or three years after, to learn that he had taken ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... forth shorn of the Slavophilic simplicities of non-resistance and humility. Labor wars, practically unknown hitherto, yet now beginning, will occur in much greater number and the peasant class, still unified, will be torn asunder by differences in wealth and interests; the middle class, now very small, will grow to large proportions, and many destructive forces will come upon the land which has hitherto mocked western Europe ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... popular infidelity, it was previously to have been expected that such leaders should have the several characteristics of a bigoted zeal for religion, or a craving appetite for worldly glory; that, from the condition liable to revolutions, it was probable to find such despots arising out of the middle class; and that, from the condition of reaction incidental to all human violences, there was a clear expectability that the power of such military monarchs should not be ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... varieties of table vegetables, and salads. These constitute an important item when there is a large family. I do not speak now of the great farmers, although even these set some store by such produce, but the middle class. It is usual in these gardens to grow immense quantities of cabbage of a coarse kind, and also of lettuce, onions, and radishes, all of which are freely given to the men and women working on the place during the harvest. They are, in fact, grown especially for them. At the dinner-hour one ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... 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, an' support ther fam'lies decently. Lastly thar's the ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... 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 "old" lei equal ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... of 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 ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... the property here held is blamelessly held in good hands—wealth that in no fair estimate can be regarded as harmful. In terms of British currency, our category of the middling rich would include the poorer individuals of the upper classes, the richer persons of the lower middle class, and the upper middle class as a whole. This comparison is made not to apply an alien class system which holds very inadequately here in America, but simply to avow the difficulty of my task of apology. The bourgeoisie ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... them which you find in people whose lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential, but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking, healthy ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... our officers stationed in Amiens, and billeted in private houses, became very friendly with the families who received them. Young girls of good middle class, the daughters of shopkeepers and schoolmasters, and merchants in a good way of business, found it delightful to wait on handsome young Englishmen, to teach them French, to take walks with them, and to arrange musical evenings with other girl friends who brought ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... especially in towns and cities, which multiplied wonderfully during the Crusades. In other words, they were no longer brutes, to be trodden down without murmur or resistance. They began to form what we call a "middle class." Feudalism, in its proud ages, did not recognize a middle class. The impoverishment of nobles by the Crusades laid the foundation of this middle class, at least in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... human hearts which beat from half after eight to six behind six floors of counters, would have revealed empty crannies, worn thin in places with the grind of routine. The eight-thirty-to-six business of muslin underwear, crash toweling, and skirt-binding. The great middle class of shoppers who come querulous with bunions and babies. The strap-hanging homeward ride. Supper, but usually within range of the range that boils it. The same smells of the same foods. The, cinematograph or front-stoop hour before bed. Or, if Love comes, and he will not ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... insurance security for all Americans 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 ...
— State of the Union Addresses of George H.W. Bush • George H.W. Bush
... ashamed of having to fight against the citizen class drunk with power, and rushing out on to the stage of the world, there to be cut to pieces perhaps by the barbarians who are at its heels. Hence, where the middle class insist on seeing princesses, these are really only ladylike young women. In these days princes can find no great ladies whom they may compromise; they cannot even confer honor on a woman taken up at random. The Duc de Bourbon was the last prince to avail ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... why; and from this appellation, no doubt, had come the name Renardet, borne by the owners of this fief, which had remained in the same family, it was said, for more than two hundred years. For the Renardets formed part of the upper middle class all but noble to be met with so often in ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... great animation and life to the appearance of a street, and I am glad to see a taste for them reviving. Augsburg must have been very gay with them two and three hundred years ago, when, also, it was the home of beautiful women of the middle class, who married princes. We went to see the house in which lived the beautiful Agnes Bernauer, daughter of a barber, who married Duke Albert III. of Bavaria. The house was nought, as old Samuel Pepys would ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... asking about class and status. One would think you'd know all about it by now. But very well. Today, since everyone is equal, there is only one class. The middle class. The only question then is—to what portion of the middle class does one belong? High, low, ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... self-conscious and to press 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 ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... one more author to be noticed whose works were still written in the earlier vein of Deism. So far Deism had not found a representative writer among the lower classes. The aristocracy and the middle class had both found exponents of their views; but Deism had penetrated into lower strata of society than these, and at length a very fitting representative of this part of the community appeared in the person of Thomas Chubb. Himself a working man, and to a great ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the part of America that makes new enterprises, the part into which the ambitious and gifted workingman makes his way up, the class that saves, that plans, that organizes, that presently spreads its enterprises until they have a national scope and character,—that middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity. Its members are sharing prosperity, no doubt; but what alarms me is that they are not originating prosperity. No country can afford to have ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... than elaborate culture, was in constant progress 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 ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... writing are the same as those of very civilized nations. They never say "tu" [i.e., "thou"] or speak in the second person, singular or plural, but always in the third person: [thus], "The chief would like this or that." Especially a woman when addressing a man, even though they be equal and of the middle class, never say less than "Sir" or "Master," and that after every word: "When I was coming, sir, up the river, I saw, sir, etc." In writing they make constant use of very fine and delicate expressions of regard, and beauties and courtesy. Their manner of salutation when they met one another was the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... establishment of other Wesleyan chapels. In its circuit there are now between 800 and 900 persons known as members, who are going on their way rejoicing; at the chapel itself there are between 300 and 400 individuals similarly situated. Viewed in the aggregate, the congregation is of a middle class character both in regard to the colour of the hair and the clothes worn. There are some exceedingly poor people at the place, but the mass appear to be individuals not particularly hampered in making provision for their general meals. Lune-street chapel is the ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... will benefit that great middle class whose savings go to make up the billions in the savings-banks, national banks, trust and insurance companies, which are used by the "System" to secure for themselves a hundred, a thousand, and ten thousand per cent. ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... between the King and the Pope. For the first time since the establishment of the kingdom of France, the town deputies were called to sit in a body in a national assembly, alongside of prelates and barons; this great event was the official acknowledgment of the middle class as the "Third Estate," and attested that henceforth the villages, the towns, the communities formed a collective ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... be no doubt, in fact, that an independent, respectable, and, I believe, trustworthy middle class is rapidly forming.... If the real object of emancipation was to place the freedman in such a position that he might work out his own advancement in the social scale, and prove his capacity for the full and rational enjoyment ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 everything for it. Our highly praised independence is, after all, but a ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... trust the people they are ensuring their own doom. They forget that there is a power greater than theirs—that England is continually on the watch to win back again her sovereignty over Ireland. Our upper class and our middle class are too jealous of their privileges to share them with us. They will give England the opportunity she wants. Then Ireland will be brought into the old subjection, and her advance towards prosperity will be checked again as it was checked before. ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... be middle class," remarked Amarinth. "Herkomer has become intentional, and so he has taken to painting the directors of railway companies. The great picture of this year's exhibition is intentional. The great picture of the year always is. It presents ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... queer things about the West Indies, as you know yourself, having lived in Cuba, is that there is really no middle class. Here, in Trinidad, there are the wealthy Spanish families and the English officials and planters. The blacks are the laborers. For many decades there has been no class between. Now, the East Indians, ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... not a misanthrope or a woman hater, as you know, yet from what I gather I fear that, in the upper middle class at least, it is the women who are responsible for this increased formality that most men naturally would avoid. Led by personal ambition, or that of young daughters, they seek to maintain a standard just enough beyond their easy grasp to feel ill at ease, if not humiliated, to be ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... wealth of Africa, Spain, Greece, and Asia, was now concentrating in Italy, and the capital was becoming absolutely demoralized. In vain the Gracchi attempted to apply a remedy. The Roman aristocracy was intoxicated, insatiate, irresistible. The middle class was gone; there was nothing but profligate nobles and a diabolical populace. In the midst of inconceivable corruption, the Jugurthine War served only to postpone for a moment an explosion which was inevitable. The Servile rebellion in Sicily broke out; it was closed by the extermination ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... his situation. His constitution was feeble; he was very shy; and he 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 ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... indifferent reader in something like the same way as memory worked upon himself. The physical activity, the "low life," and the open air of the books are powerful. These and the England of his youth gave Borrow his refuge from middle age and Victorian England of the middle class. "Youth," he says in "The Romany Rye," "is the only season for enjoyment, and the first twenty-five years of one's life are worth all the rest of the longest life of man, even though these five and twenty be spent in penury and ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the very poor man, who has no 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 young man, it must be ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... arrives a chance of doing that successfully. Popular audiences can always be depended upon to cheer the statement of "a plain man" that he is not "clever" enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An assurance that life is too short to be troubled with Henry James wakes the lower middle class to ecstasy. An opportunity for such protests is provided by our English lack of critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying, "I do hate" or "I must say I rather like" this or that without reference to any species of authority. This seems to have grown with dangerous rapidity ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... very useful lessons. I've been working out the scheme; it would amuse you vastly, Reardon. The first lesson deals with the question of subjects, local colour—that kind of thing. I gravely advise people, if they possibly can, to write of the wealthy middle class; that's the popular subject, you know. Lords and ladies are all very well, but the real thing to take is a story about people who have no titles, but live in good Philistine style. I urge study of horsey matters especially; that's very important. You must be well ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... population in this country may be traced to geographical differences, constitute an important part of this treatise. The reader is finally directed to see the colonial family as a property institution dominated by middle class standards and operating as an agency of social control in the midst of the social order governed by the interests of a forceful aristocracy, which shaped religion, education, politics, and all else ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... 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, ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... could become articulate, might tell us something of the life of the average girl to-day. Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society. Meenachi's father is a weaver of the far-famed Madura muslins with their gold thread border. Her earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers' street where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind trees and, ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... these relatives. It is almost impossible for a bright-witted lad born in the lower middle class to escape this stage of development. The brutally healthy boy contemns the female sex because he sees it incapable of his own athletic sports, but Godwin was one of those upon whose awaking intellect is forced a perception of the brain-defect so general in women when they are taught ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... doubted the grounds for their calling, having by no means made up their minds whether they could take the Allens into their exclusive circle. So thus far Mrs. Allen and her daughters had given audience to a sort of middle class of skirmishers and scouts representing no one in particular save themselves, who from a penchant in that direction went out and obtained information, so that the more solid ranks behind could know what to ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... rage for gentility is most prevalent amongst the upper, middle, or lower classes it is difficult to say; the priest in the text seems to think that it is exhibited in the most decided manner in the middle class; it is the writer's opinion, however, that in no class is it more strongly developed than in the lower: what they call being well born goes a great way amongst them, but the possession of money much farther, whence Mr. Flamson's influence over ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... He was defeated in the battle of Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington, and died in exile on the isle of St. Helena. Emerson takes him as a type of the man of the world in his Representative Men: "I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the middle class of modern society.... He was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the inventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, the subverter of monopoly and abuse.... He had the virtues of the masses of his constituents: he had also their vices. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 fact, that under this regime of an annual pontificate, changed according to the caprice ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... domestic virtues rare in his day, unbounded faith in the cause for which he stood, and abilities which without wealth or strong connections were destined to place him on the height of power. The middle class, as yet almost voiceless, looked to him as its champion; but he was not the champion of a class. His patriotism was as comprehensive as it was haughty and unbending. He lived for England, loved her with intense devotion, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... 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 ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... others. The popular jest as to the United States Senate being a "millionaires' club" has become antiquated; much more appropriately it could be termed a "multimillionaires' club." While in both houses of Congress are legislators who represent the almost extinguished middle class, their votes are as ineffective as their declamations are flat. The Government of the United States, viewing it as an entirety, and not considering the impotent exceptions, is now more avowedly a capitalist Government than ever before. ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... built. When its beautiful notes rose and fell, when sweet voices swelled the wave of sound, then even the vicar's restless spirit was soothed in the fulfilment of his hope. A large proportion of the upper and middle class of the parish was, without a doubt, now gathered around him; and there was much sympathy manifested from adjacent parishes with his objects, sympathy which often took the form of subscriptions from ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... of such men are given. The best is that of George Drafton, in In Her Earliest Youth. In no other novel are the rough good-nature and loose, slangy talk of the young Australian sportsman of the upper-middle class more naturally expressed. The author's knowledge of the cant terms and short cuts in the vocabulary of the not necessarily ill-educated but supremely careless colonial young man is almost equal to that of Rolf Boldrewood, who has been listening ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... 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; in short, the winter was infinitely ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... again, Delafield, making cautious inquiries, came across some unfavorable details, confided to him by a man of Warkworth's own regiment. His father had retired from the army immediately after the Mutiny, broken in health, and much straitened in means. Himself belonging to a family of the poorer middle class, he had married late, a good woman not socially his equal, and without fortune. They settled in the Isle of Wight, on his half-pay, and harassed by a good many debts. Their two children, Henry and Isabella, were then growing up, and the parents' hopes were fixed upon their promising ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the opposite turn and has distributed the shares of the industrial companies into hundreds of thousands of hands. Other prophecies foretold the end of the small farmer, still others the uprooting of the middle class, others gave the date for the great crash; and everything would have come out exactly as the prophets foresaw it, if they had not forgotten to consider many other factors in the social situation which gave to the events a very different turn. But it may be acknowledged that the wrong prophesying ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... in Berlin includes the German "higher" and "lower" nobility, with the exception of the so-called Fronde, who proudly absent themselves from it; the Ministers; the diplomatic corps; Court officials; and such members of the burghertum, or middle class, as hold offices which entitle them to attend court. The wives, however, of those in the last category are not "court-capable" on this account, nor is the middle class generally, nor even members of the Imperial or Prussian Parliaments as such. Members ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... club-man, the society 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 like the thick, sturdy growths on ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... console myself with that idea. Otherwise it would be a frightful business, and what would become of us, I cannot tell. But I do not believe that even Gladstone would be so insane as to give it us. I cannot believe that the middle class voters of England would stand by and see the corresponding class in this country exterminated. Home Rule as much as you like, if we had the right men. The very poorest peasants are becoming alive to the ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... admission to the exclusive circles of the nobility had been sufficiently marked to induce Moliere to attack it in his Bourgeois gentilhomme, it was even more noticeable in the eighteenth, and mesalliances between noblemen and women of the middle class ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... that, Governor. Don't look at it that way. What am I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: "You're undeserving; so you can't have it." But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... affairs sufficiently to 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 presents strange and ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... rule with less difficulty than would otherwise have been the case. By the ruin of some of the principal nobles he has saved him from the worst enemies of his ancestors, who so frequently proved their destroyers; and by the creation of a wealthy middle class, every day improving in education and numbers, he has formed a strong body who find that it is their interest to support him. When it is no longer their interest so to do, the whole fabric of Russian government will crumble to ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... 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, is ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... occasional fee for some hours' talking; he cannot find one to earn a certain hire under the sun in his plantation, and the work is all transacted by immigrant Chinese. One cannot but be reminded of the love of the French middle class for office work; but in Hawaii, it is the race in bulk that shrinks from manly occupation. During a late revolution, a lady found a powerful young Hawaiian crouching among the grass in her garden. "What are you doing here?" ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the British civilian very seldom proceed either from Indians of the upper classes or from the humbler folk. They generally proceed from the new, more or less Western-educated middle class whose attitude towards British officials is seldom calculated to promote cordial relations; and they are also sometimes inspired by another class of Indian who, one may hope, will before long have vanished, but whom of all others the ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... very little actual power. It was ruled by a number of kings who sat upon shaky thrones. The every-day government was in the hands of thousands of feudal princelets. Their subjects were peasants or serfs. There were few cities. There was hardly any middle class. But during the thirteenth century (after an absence of almost a thousand years) the middle class—the merchant class—once more appeared upon the historical stage and its rise in power, as we saw in the last chapter, had meant a decrease in the ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... tapestry hangings, Maximilian Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made against him was that he had styled himself ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... was easy to see as she 'd really took it a good deal to heart bein' thirded for sixteen miles; but Gran'ma Mullins went right on with when she lived in Meadville 'n' taught school that winter she was seventeen. She said as Rufus was in her middle class that winter 'n' mos' superior. He was nine 'n' the oldest o' nine, there bein' two pairs o' twins; she said it looked like Tabitha 'n' Sammy had took the Bible about replenishin' the earth right on to their own shoulders. Gran'ma Mullins said it was suthin' to make any ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... Shakespeare and his contemporaries. They were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation; they applied freely in literature the then modern ideas,—the ideas of the Renascence and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great English middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakespeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, says Job, and ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... receive a commission as second lieutenant who could not show four generations of nobility on his father's side, counting himself. Thus were all members of families recently ennobled excluded from the service, and no door was left open to the military ambition of people belonging to the middle class; although that class was yearly increasing in importance. Moreover, strict genealogical proofs were required, the candidate for a commission having to submit his papers to the royal herald. Exceptions were made in favor of ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... two-sided, duplex; and that in the same proportion in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same proportion in which there is development of the productive forces, there is also developed a force that begets repression; that these conditions only generate middle class wealth by continuously destroying the wealth of individual members of that class, and by producing ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... journal written by a young girl belonging to the upper middle class is a letter by Sigmund Freud dated April 27, 1915, a letter wherein the distinguished Viennese psychologist testifies to the ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... rebels, and simon-pure bandits who are contributing 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 revolution was necessary—the peril ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... that the proposal to abolish Tom Scott's office without compensation was not a reckless experiment of a fundamental kind. It was a mere attempt at diminishing the heavy burdens laid on the people for the advantage of a small portion of the middle class, and yet Scott resented it with as much display of selfish passion—considering his genuine nobility of breeding—as that with which the rude working men of Jedburgh afterwards resented his gallant protest against the Reform Bill, and, later again, saluted the dauntless old man with the dastardly ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... highest class, when they hear about the Tao, earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it. Scholars of the lowest class, when they have heard about it, laugh greatly at it. If it were not (thus) laughed at, it would not be fit ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... 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 of the government. In fact, there are no other than the governors and the governed. If a ...
— 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
... regions and different social classes. The mortality rate from syphilis for males above fifteen is highest for unskilled labour, then for the group intermediate between unskilled and skilled labour, then for the upper and middle class, followed by the group intermediate between this class and skilled labour, while skilled labour, textile workers, and miners follow, and agricultural labourers come out most favourably of all. These differences do not represent any ascending grade in ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... on a 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. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... earth in order to bring him to their parties, though probably had he chosen he might have worked himself back "into society" in a slower but more permanent fashion. This, however, he did not choose, but fell back among the convivial middle class, the undistinguished and over merry, where nobody thought it too great humility to refer to Allan Ramsay and Fergusson as his models. It must be recollected, however, that his second visit to Edinburgh, and what seems in the telling a foolish and almost vulgar flirtation, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... instinct of brave, active, able men, throughout the middle class everywhere, has pointed out Napoleon as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... 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 de ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... my cow brewer's daughter, she would have been too virtuously middle class to have thought of such a thing. And if I take this American—well, the Americans are so new a nation they have still a moral sense. So I think ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... clearly defined as it is in politics and science. For in 1871, the year of the Treaty of Frankfort, an act was passed after a long working-class agitation, assisted by certain eminent members of the middle class, legalizing strikes and Trade Unions. And now at the end of the war, all over the world, society is faced by the problem of reconciling the full rights, and in some cases the extreme demands, of 'labour', with democratic government and the prosperity ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... of this order of things alike detrimental to the well-being of society. First there does not exist, at least in the agricultural districts, any middle class of society at all, which is everywhere divided into two orders,—the gentry and the peasantry. In cities and large towns the case is, of course, different; for there the cultivation of letters and of trade ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... 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
... the runaway apprentices—boys of eighteen and twenty, of middle class English families, who had jumped their ships and apprenticeships in various ports of the world and drifted into the forecastles of the sealing schooners. They were healthy, smooth-skinned, clear-eyed, and they were young—youths like me, learning the ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... seemed to prevent their social contact with one another. Outside of Moses Mendelssohn's house, until the end of the eighties the only rendezvous of wits, scholars, and literary men, the preference was for magnificent banquets and noisy carousals, each rank entertaining its own members. In the middle class, the burghers, the social instinct had not awakened at all. Alexander Humboldt significantly dated his first letter to Henriette Herz from Schloss Langeweile. In the course of time the desire for spiritual sympathy led to the formation of reading clubs and conversazioni. ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... grin, and nodded. In ten seconds the chief stood before me. He could speak a broken English, and said he would be glad to show me round. It was a third class school, and I gathered that in Holland there are three grades of State school; the first class is attended by the rich, the second by the middle class, and ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... The bourgeoisie or middle class bore the brunt of the taxes. A gay parasitic element, the demi-monde, ministered to the nobles' pleasures. Below, the "submerged tenth" of the thievish and begging classes plied their questionable trades, with a large margin of ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... more important role in Russia than it does in other countries. What Russia has lacked has been neither an educated class nor masses capable and ready to be trained to any kind of modern employment, but a great technically trained, free and organised "intellectual middle class"—an expression I am forced to coin for my present purpose. It is hardly necessary to prove this assertion. The world is well acquainted with Russian genius in literature, art, music, philosophy, sociology, economics, history, and the ...
— The Shield • Various
... were all the more accentuated by the absence both of other European peoples and of a definite middle class of any race. Everywhere in the areas tenanted originally by Spaniards and Portuguese the European of alien stock was unwelcome, even though he obtained a grudging permission from the home governments to remain a colonist. In Brazil, owing to the close commercial connections between Great Britain ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... Boulogne, near Paris, was named Georges Marie Destourny. His father, obliged by adverse circumstances to sell his connection, died in 1824, leaving his son without the means of living, after giving him a brilliant education, the folly of the lower middle class. At twenty-three the clever young law-student had denied his paternity by printing ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... not like Americans. Barbarians they were, and these were of the middle class, being in trade. For a scenic railway is trade, naturally. Except that they paid a fat salary, with an extra month at Christmas, she would not be there. She and Pepy, the maid, had many disputes about this. But Pepy was a Dalmatian, and did ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and poverty, the courtiers and their imitators, the beggars and the sharpers, are those of whom we hear most; but the greater part of the population, that which controlled the city government, was of the middle class, sober, self-respecting tradespeople, inclined towards Puritanism, and jealous of their independence. Such people naturally distrusted and disliked the actors and their class, and used against them, as far as they could, the great authority ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... is welcomed as a new delight. Their parents, where positive cruelty has not installed fear and cast out love, are the divinities of even the most neglected. They feel towards them much the same, I fancy, as the children of ordinary parents in the middle class—love them more than children given over to nurses and governesses love theirs. Nor do I feel certain that the position of the children of the poor, in all its oppression, is not more favorable to the development of the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... could suck real milk out of real bottles into tin-lined stomachs. Some exquisitely gowned porcelain Parisiennes, with eyelashes and long hair cut from the heads of penniless children, were almost as big and as aristocratic as their potential millionaire mistresses. Humbler sisters of middle class combined prettiness with cheapness, and had the satisfaction of showing ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... franchise admitted to the voting privilege all lodgers occupying for as much as a year rooms of the clear value, unfurnished, of L10 a year. The effect of these provisions was to enfranchise the urban working population, even as the act of 1832 had enfranchised principally the urban middle class. So broad, indeed, did the urban franchise at this point become that little room was left for its modification subsequently. As originally planned, Disraeli's measure would have enlarged the electorate by not ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... purely constitutional government, and would, of course, have preferred either of these for his country. But while theory pointed in that direction, facts were all pulling the opposite way. The materials for the establishment of such a state of things did not exist in a strong middle class or an equal balance of parties. The choice lay between the anarchy of a continued strife of selfish factions, and the concentration of power in the hands of some individual who should be capable of enforcing law at home and commanding respect abroad. So at least Horace obviously ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... they have hurled abuse at the throne, at the whole Old Order of things. And now, when they see to what chaos things are coming, when they wish to stop at moderation, at order, at a monarchy based on solid principles and supported by the solid middle class, they are suddenly made to realize how little their theories correspond with their real desires. Incapacity, misrule, is everywhere. Narbonne has been made War Minister! At this crisis, when the allied ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... natural enough." "But," he says, "our masses 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
... probably 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... succeeding my arrival principally in examining the town and its environs, and, as I strolled about, entering into conversation with various people that I met; several of these were of the middle class, shopkeepers and professional men; they were all Constitutionalists, or pretended to be so, but had very little to say except a few commonplace remarks on the way of living of the friars, their hypocrisy and laziness. I endeavoured to obtain some information respecting ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... political world and this are 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 ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... should make an idol of the author of Clarissa Harlowe. The spirit of reaction against the artificiality of the pseudo-classic drama, which drove him to feel the way to a drama of real life in the middle class, made him exult in the romance of ordinary private life which was invented by Richardson. It was no mere accident that the modern novel had its origin in England, but the result of general social causes. The modern novel essentially depends ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... was accordingly roused in her otherwise tranquil disposition. It was not surprising that this resentment increased as the years went on, and manifested itself in a manner characteristic of a girl sprung from the lower middle class, in whom mere superficial polish had taken the place of any true culture. The real torment of our subsequent life together lay in the fact that, owing to her violence, I had lost the last support I had hitherto found in her exceptionally sweet disposition. At that time I was filled only with ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Army last year might be divided into three categories: "A small number of 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
... pockets before he found them. And when they were adjusted, 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. But what was he doing ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... is told that the whole governing power of Great Britain, the King, the Ministry, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the Tories as a party, the Whigs as a party, and—all party divisions aside—the great Middle Class of Englishmen set themselves in horrified antagonism to the Charter and its advocates, as though the former were the most incendiary document in the world and the latter a rabble of radicals gathered from the purlieus ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... the direction of M. Olier, founder of St. Sulpice. The first expedition was placed under the command of a valiant gentleman, Paul de Maisonneuve, and of a certain Mademoiselle Mance, belonging to the middle class of Nogent-le-Roi, who was not yet a nun, but who was destined to become the foundress of the hospital-sisters of Ville-Marie, the name which the religious zeal of the explorers intended for the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ancient military costume of that section. The uniforms of the regular Greek soldiers are very similar to those worn by the soldiers of our own country. The officers we met were handsome men and especially well uniformed. The well-to-do and middle class Athenian people whom we saw on the streets were dressed in modern ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... primitive about the Spanish servants. A flavor of the old romances and the old comedy still hangs about them. They are chatty and confidential to a degree that appalls a stiff and formal Englishman of the upper middle class. The British servant is a chilly and statuesque image of propriety. The French is an intelligent and sympathizing friend. You can make of him what you like. But the Italian, and still more the Spaniard, is as gay as a child, and as incapable of intentional ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... influential citizens. Among the latter were the extreme clericals, who distrusted France and Russia on religious grounds, aristocrats who viewed Germany as a bulwark against socialism; bankers with German connections, and a great body of the middle class who dreaded a war that would interfere with their comfort and prosperity. A genuine admiration for Germany's military prowess, exemplified in the successive victories of 1914, offset to a large extent traditional antipathy to Austria. Nevertheless, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... the first part of the nineteenth century. An old man and an upholder of old treatments; having a practice mainly among the middle class. Attended Cesar Birotteau, Jules Desmarets, Mme. Descoings and Vanda de Mergi. His name was still cited at the end of Louis Philippe's reign. [Cesar Birotteau. The Thirteen. A Bachelor's Establishment. The Seamy ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... 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
... of country towns, there were many more actual makers of things than now, such as tailors and bootmakers, patten makers, maltsters; and there were several academies, as the schools for the middle class were called. Thus in Royston there were the following:—Rev. Samuel Cautherley, and also Mr. Yorke, Melbourn Street; John Kent, (gentlemen's boarding,) Back Street (now Mr. A. Gosling's); Mrs. Towne, wife of the minister at the ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... with dominant characters; he was quick rather to sense the idiosyncrasies of the average person. His observation was caught by the seemingly unimportant, but no less identifying peculiarities of the middle class. Besides which, his irony was never more happy than when aimed against that social set which he ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The Moth and the Flame • Clyde Fitch
... had the sturdy, untutored nature of the upper middle class. The universe seemed plain to him. 'The thing's right,' he would say, or 'the thing's wrong'; and there was an end of it. There was a contained, prophetic energy in his utterances, even on the slightest ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... quietness, and beauty, which you may find everywhere in the country round about Florence, is the true Tuscany. The vulgarity of the city, for even in Italy the city life has become insincere, blatant, and for the most part a life of the middle class, seldom reaches an hundred yards beyond the barriera: and this is a charm in Florence, for you may so easily look on her from afar. And so, if one comes to her from the country, or returns to her from her own hills, it is ever with a sense of loss, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... different classes which determines whether the birth rate shall be large or small; and the fact is that in the case of the rich it is small, in the case of the poor it is comparatively large, while in the case of a certain middle class, composed of small employers, salaried men, professional men, and a multitude of highly paid workers, it is neither very large nor very small, but moderate. In a general way the birth rate varies inversely as the earning ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... phrase covers may be seen by turning to Heron's account of some of the scenes in which Burns mingled. Tavern life was then in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, more or less habitual in all classes. In those clubs and brotherhoods of the middle class, which met in taverns down the closes and wynds of High Street, Burns found a welcome, warmer, freer, more congenial than any vouchsafed to him in more polished coteries. Thither convened when their day's work was done, lawyers, writers, schoolmasters, printers, shopkeepers, tradesmen,—ranting, ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... more, by selling his coal at the best possible moment. He is not the aristocratic politician, who has a cynical but a fair sympathy with both economic opportunities. But he is the man who appears in scores of public places open to the upper middle class or (that less known but more powerful section) the lower upper class. Men like this all over the country are really saying whatever comes into their heads in their capacities of justice of the peace, candidate for Parliament, Colonel of the Yeomanry, ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... conservative and fearful of innovation, and those who believe in the progressive tendency of the Anglo-Saxon. Within the last quarter of a century, the public opinion of England has been undergoing a great change, especially that part of it which is influenced by the lower-middle class. The people have been growing up to the adoption of liberal principles of government. The Reform Bill of 1832 was a great stride in that direction; and the measures which have followed upon it have widened the observation of the masses, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... her days have to be spent in bed. Fortunately, however, there are many mothers who have very different conceptions of their duties to home and children. We find such mothers very often among the class of skilled artisans, but also among the cultured middle class,[143] although among these latter the desire to ape the manners of the so-called upper classes is unfortunately far too general. I have seen cases in which the mother was still the confidant of her sons after they had entered ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll |
