CLASS DISTINCTION

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 153, 19 September 1927, Page 5

CLASS DISTINCTION

THE RIGID SOCIAL ORDERS OF OLD ENGLAND An English woman who is a friend of mine asked two men to lunch, the other day, says a London correspondent. One of them was an Australian and the other an American. Conversation turned on labour unrest in Great Britain. “What’s the matter here,” said the American, “i 3 class distinctions. In America, people who hold subservient posts do not assume they are going: to .remain in them.

Every man’s ambition is to rise to the top. But in England, a farm labourer expects to remain a farm labourer, a cook a. cook, and a shop assistant a shop assistant.” The Australian nodded in agreement. And the public schools,” he murmured. “over here, are not public schools, but private ones. They are very good, and there isn’t anything like them on the Continent, but they’re no more for the nation in general than motor-cars. It’s a pity more boys can’t go to public schools, and get the advantage of them —their traditions, surroundings, and other good things.” “But our board schools, too, are excellent,” remarked their hostess, and the American laughed. “Excellent,” he agreed, “and the first thing you upper classes want to know about, another man is ‘Where did he go to school?’ It’s a hall mark. If the man said he went to a board school you would look down on him.” Th€ English woman spoke. “Perhaps you are right,” she said, “although I hope .you are not. Yet both of you forget our English society is a growth, and not a creation of a hundred years or so. In mediaeval times production was the work of guilds, and members of one guild became experts at one particular thing, and never expected to do anything else. Yeomen, aLso, were yeomen. and peasants peasants for life. The system worked very well then, but the fact Jiat we are growing, does not make it possible to shake it off at once. “America and Australia lose something by being new countries, but they have the advantage of not being shackled by ancient customs, outgrown traditions, and also of inheriting the garnered experience of their race, unhampered by a rigid social order—which, by the way, grows less rigid in England itself every year.”