CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 736, 21 August 1953, Page 5

CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS

Sir-We inherit from the Victorian period — in attenuated form — classconsciousness that marks people off according to their money, possessions and leisure. The casual labourer, e.g., the dock worker, was lower than the man with steady daily work or the weekly wage-earner, who was lower than the salaried man, who was lower than the professional man, who was lower than the landed gentleman or aristocrat. There was the broad general distinction between the manual worker and the brain worker. Our competitive society pivots on the struggle. between individuals for preeminencé linked to position, wealth and authority. Until we know them intimately, we are prone to classify persons by externals-to judge the sausage by its skin, as it were. Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class gives us the clue to some of our social distinctions: "Gentle blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative." Lord Elton, writing on social sectarianism in 1949, said: "For a good many generations yet the existing aristocracy, or aristocracies-for there are several -may well survive . . The peer may sup in the kitchen on and cheese,

and his wife wash up after the meal; but they are unlikely to sit down with the agricultural labourer to eat it." There is less demarcation in education and approximately universality of opportunity in New Zealand as compared with the, older countries, and this tends to wash out class-consciousness. Yet I think we could find class-consciousness operating at the crucial point of. marriage. Shaw held that "Equality in practice means intermarriageability.". I think that a very good standard of measurement. ;

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru), _