A GLOOMY OUTLOOK.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 139, 21 September 1910, Page 4

A GLOOMY OUTLOOK.

There is a wail at Home that the "middle class" is decaying. It is copying the luxury of the "upper class" and spends more than it can afford in riotous, motor cars, theatre-parties, and general gorgeousness. It is losing its stodginess, and it is impossible at Nice or in Rome or wherever the English tourist may go, to distinguish the successful ironmonger from the latest recruit to the House of Lords. The people who see the decay of the backbone of England in thivtlessness of the middle class are very naturally concerned about it, because the "upper class" does not like the middle class to imitate it, and is jealous of its privileges. The middle class always has imitated th* upper-class, and the "middle lower class" has always imitated the middle n'ass, and the "lower class" (cries of horror!i has always been very middle classey if it •had a few shillings' to spend. Ther-? is always extravagance and display and uiter foolishness in all classes in every nation when times are good. The "classes" are recruited and strengthened each from the other. Enquiring closely into the family history of an "upper cla»s" person, one may find a coaMie.iver or a poacher or a tinker chroi generations back—and the blue-bIood"d family ;s no worse for the tinker striin. '[h*s Mavfair lady who goes in for "slumming" is horrified at the dreadful extravagance of Liza of Shoreditch who wears a "hostridge fewer," and when she finds that people with ten shillings a week are dining on winkles when skillv is avainbM she almost faint 9 into her 1000-guinea motor brougham, and is waft<H. away to eat her little three-guinea ojeal. "We don't believe in this decay notion, ai:d if the middle class is on its last legs, the coster hasn't a foot to stand on and. the aristocrat is wearing cork supports If one class is decaying, so is th» other. They are dependent on each other, and if the workers died out the aristocrats would have to take their places. And it's a glorious thought that we who are hewers of wood and drawers of water may be the ancestors of belted earls, or that the successors of the present House of Lords may be chopping firewood for a living in 15)60.