"Middle class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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
... to secure immigration fit in the end to assume the duties and burdens of full American citizenship, and whenever the leaders in the various industries of those islands finally adopt our ideals and heartily join our administration in endeavoring to develop a middle class of substantial citizens, a way will then be found to deal with the commercial and industrial problems which now appear to them so serious. The best Americanism is that which aims for stability and permanency of prosperous citizenship, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... three excellent portraits 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 to the talk of ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... about ten o'clock, a fly stopped at the gate at Hogglestock Parsonage, and out of it there came two men. One was dressed in ordinary black clothes, and seemed from his bearing to be a respectable man of the middle class of life. He was, however, the superintendent of police for the Silverbridge district. The other man was a policeman, pure and simple, with the helmet-looking hat which has lately become common, and all the ordinary half-military ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... thing that will settle the whole trouble, can carry people to a level beyond an undivided trust in something warranted in a bottle. They are ready to put their faith in what amounts to practically nothing in a bottle. And just at present, while a number of excellent people of the middle class think that only a "man" is wanted and all will be well with us, there is a considerable wave of hopefulness among the working class in favour of a weak solution of nothing, which is offered under the attractive label of Syndicalism. So far I have been able ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... information reached him from all courts and quarters of Europe: and it was a common phrase, that 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, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... 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 ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... made me feel that everybody was looking at me, a feeling something between vanity and embarrassment. My cousin met me in Boston at the stage office and took me to his house in the old West End, at that time the residence of the respectable middle class, with here and there some more wealthy citizens. There were a few shops at the corners of the streets; but I did not venture beyond the street where my cousin lived and saw nothing at all of the city. I was ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... 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 come, he will be the person ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had no successor. Yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage of the masses. "The people," as spoken of by their historians and philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which owned at least one slave. The slaves themselves, the real "masses," had no political or social existence more than the horses with which they were sent to the river to drink. In any ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... century have mostly originated in two totally distinct ranks of society. They have either been the scions of noble and powerful families; or they have arisen, in spite of circumstance, from humble parents, by the sole recommendation of personal worth. Of the great middle class, the class which is certainly the most respectable of the English community, and which is at present the controlling power in the state, but few have recently attained great eminence. That the titled and wealthy should advance to power and influence ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... promenade took him by the arm and led him toward the garden. He was clad in black and enveloped in a large cloak that would have made him look like a priest had it not been for the high hat, ornamented with the national cockade, which proved him a patriot of the middle class. His thin, emaciated face, deeply furrowed with wrinkles indicated that he had long since passed his sixtieth birthday; but there was nothing else in his appearance that betokened old age. His form was so erect, his eye so clear, his step so firm, that one, not seeing his face, would have thought ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... quite content with this middle class joy. The price paid in advance for the exaltation described by Saint John ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... largest, and most helpful thinker of modern times," was born August 28, 1749, at Frankfurt on the Main.[2] He was christened Johann Wolfgang. In his early years his familiar name was Wolfgang, or simply Wolf, never Johann. His family was of the middle class, the aristocratic von which sometimes appears in his name, in accordance with German custom, having come to him with a patent of nobility which he received in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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
... welcome to your foretaste of joy. For you are at war not only with the Pompeians, but with the entire republic. Every one, gods and men, the highest rank, the middle class, the lowest dregs of the people, citizens and foreigners, men and women, free men and slaves, all hate you. We saw this the other day on some false news that came; but we shall soon see it from the way in which true news is received. And if you ponder these things with yourself ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... 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 ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... to have been prepared, like his speeches, and he is even reported to have carried his book of mots in his pocket, as a young lady of the middle class might, but seldom does, carry her book of etiquette into a party. But some of his ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... poor as rot, and the rich are very rich. There is no substantial well-to-do middle class. The slaves are, in fact, the middle class here. They are not considered so good, of course, as their masters, but a great deal better than the white trash. One enthusiastic colored man said in my hearing this evening: "You look like ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... have no difficulty in getting their liquor through interstate commerce, while the more disreputable classes succeed in getting it surreptitiously. Prohibition, therefore, if effective at all, is probably only effective among the respectable middle class where, perhaps, of all it is least needed. In the older States, at least in Massachusetts, there has been a decided tendency away from prohibition in the last twenty years, and even from local prohibition in the larger ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... the sterner sex cannot long withstand continual drudgery. One is tempted to believe that such men married to save the expense of hiring a housekeeper, that they hoped by sleeping with their laundress to avoid wash bills. Take the great middle class of America (which is the social and moral cream of the country) and you will find that, as a rule, the men have abundant leisure in which to recuperate from the exhaustion of labor, and are robust as Jove's Phoenician bull, while their wives slave from early ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... no reason for being bullied by it into a tame admission that what has always been must always be. I see no reason for exalting the unconscious failures of other revolutions into deliberate models for the next one. Just because the capacity of aggression in the middle class ran away with things, and failed to fuse into any decent social ideal, is not ground for trying as earnestly as possible to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... end of the fourteenth century, the rigorous laws of mortmain began to fall into disuse in the provinces; though if the name began to disappear, the condition itself continued to exist. The free men, whether they belonged to the middle class or to the peasantry, were nevertheless still subject to pay fines or obligations to their lords of such a nature that they must be considered to have been practically in the same position as mortmains. In fact, this custom had been so deeply rooted into ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... 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
... In the great middle class of American society, there is a lack of repose and an absence of relaxation which ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... society at Rome during this period were very unpromising. It was a mixture of extremes. There was no middle class. At the head of it was an emperor, often deified in his lifetime, and separated from even the noblest of the senators by a distance of immeasurable superiority. He, was, in the startling language of Gibbon, at once "a priest, an atheist, and a god." [8] Surrounding his person and forming his ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say that scarcely ten out of a hundred are chaste, while, as rakish young Swedes have coolly informed me, many girls of respectable parentage, belonging to the middle class, are not much better. The men, of course, are much worse than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, the number of broken-down young men, and blear-eyed, hoary sinners, is astonishing. I have never been in any place where licentiousness was ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... 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 has ever since been proportionate ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The middle class also can enjoy their freedom from oppression, and a nominal share in politics, and they pay ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... unlimited and irresponsible sovereignty. To investigate all the reasons for the political backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one reason lies on the surface. Outside the free towns they had produced no middle class; and their towns were neither numerous nor wealthy enough to be important in national politics. They were not even represented in the national assemblies. In consequence the sovereigns of these states were obliged to govern by the help ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... rapid formalism of a new commonalty. industrial [446] expansion, the rise of a new aristocracy of wealth, and popular representation in government! Old Japan had never developed a wealthy and powerful middle class: she had not even approached that stage of industrial development which, in the ancient European societies, naturally brought about the first political struggles between rich and poor. Her social organization made industrial oppression ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... hemispheric. The middle classes in this country, upon whom the nation has depended for holding the balance of power and for acting as mediators between the two extremes, are diminishing; and if things go on at the same ratio as they are now going, it will not be very long before there will be no middle class in this country, but all will be very rich or very poor, princes or paupers, and the country will be given up to ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... he thought it over more soberly, Dave could not help thinking that he must have had as parents persons in that broad, and altogether desirable, middle class. ...
— Cowboy Dave • Frank V. Webster
... have committed the blunder of abandoning their ground; they were 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. ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... Martinez Campos, the failure of the insurrection would have been little short of certain. It sent out Weyler, on whom the Cubans, twenty years earlier, had conferred the title of "Butcher." This step threw to the side of the insurgents the great mass of the middle class Cubans who had previously wavered in uncertainty, questioning the success of revolution while adhering to its general object. Weyler instituted the brutal policy that came to be known as reconcentration. It may be said, in a way, that the Cuban forces ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... middleman—the clothier, as he was called—who in his turn disposed of it to the mercantile middleman, who was called a draper. The clothiers grew rapidly in wealth and importance, and in certain parts of the country became the backbone of the middle class. They pursued their activities in country villages, rather than in the old corporate towns, for they wished to avoid the restrictions of the gilds, and gradually the cloth industry migrated almost entirely to the country. In the west of England and in East ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... Marseilles, Ister, and Heraclea. In the one case they were weakened by their own jealousies, in the other by the jealousies of their rivals. The progress of civilization and the growing habits of commerce gradually introduced a medium between the populace and the chiefs. The MIDDLE CLASS slowly rose, and with it rose the desire of extended ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of crowds to everything that does not plainly touch their immediate interests. Questions of doctrine, such as socialism, only recruit champions boasting genuine convictions among the quite illiterate classes, among the workers in mines and factories, for instance. Members of the lower middle class, and working men possessing some degree of instruction, have either become utterly sceptical or extremely ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... English hukni. It is practised in various ways, all very similar; the defrauding of some simple person of money or property being the object in view. Females are generally the victims of the trick, especially those of the middle class, who are more accessible to the poor woman than those of the upper. One of the ways, perhaps the most artful, will be found described ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... had set out to walk along the coast and meet us, and was brought back from the first village, fifteen miles away, more dead than alive. Billy was a young man, about twenty-five years old, whose hardships had given him a middle-aged appearance. He belonged to the American middle class and was apparently well educated, and, as I suppress his name, there can be no harm in ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the inconceivable multitude of paupers, who swarm like locusts over the surface of the country, rests upon the middle and lower classes, or rather upon the latter, for there is scarcely such a thing in this unhappy country as a middle class. In not one out of a thousand instances do the gentry contribute to the mendicant poor. In the first place, a vast proportion of our landlords are absentees, who squander upon their own pleasures or vices, in the ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... of the other three; but he is in his dotage and the courtiers are already laying wagers as to his successor. Many think Father Ignazio will replace him, but I stake my faith on Trescorre. The Duke dislikes him, but he is popular with the middle class, who, since they have shaken off the yoke of the Jesuits, would not willingly see an ecclesiastic at the head of the state. The duchess's influence is also against the Dominican, for her Highness, being, as you know, connected with the Austrian court, is by ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the middle class is next to impossible. They've been bowing and scraping until there's a permanent kink in ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... words work upon the 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 contempt, and the rest in the possession ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Mother, with the little daughter at the bedside, the cry of agony arrested on her lips, the death chamber exhaling poverty and sorrow. By preference Munch selects his themes among the poor and the middle class. He can paint an empty room traversed by a gleam of moonlight and set one to thinking a half day on such an apparently barren theme. He may suggest the erotic, but never the lascivious. A thinker doubled by an artist he is the one man north who recalls the harsh ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— 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
... movement toward free trade began in England, it was largely a movement of the middle classes and of the industrial interests of Great Britain. The great middle class of England, which furnishes the backbone and sinew of the nation, is essentially a moral class, and in appealing to it the political leader is always tempted to put forward the moral aspect of his theme, even if he has to twist his argument and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... faithfully fulfilled. At first Christ drew all men to Himself; but, as his ministry proceeded, He revealed their quality. A few were permanently attracted to Him; the majority were as definitely repelled. There was no middle class. Men were either for or against Him. The sheep on this side; the goats on that. The five wise virgins, and the five foolish. Those who entered the strait gate, and those who flocked down the broad way that ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... of prostitutes contained three chief classes. The first and lowest were the Dicteriads, so called from Diete (Crete), who imitated Pasiphae, wife of Minos, in preferring a bull to a husband; above them was the middle class, the Aleutridae, who were the Almahs or professional musicians, and the aristocracy was represented by the Hetairai, whose wit and learning enabled them to adorn more than one page of Grecian history. The grave Solon, who had studied in Egypt, established a vast Dicterion ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... the praiseworthy, whereas this figure of speech should be used but extremely seldom; for, in the long run, it becomes annoying to clear-sighted men, perplexes the weak, while indeed it pleases the great middle class, who, without any special expense of mind, can fancy themselves more knowing than others. But whatever he brings before us, and however he does it, alike bears witness to his rectitude, cheerfulness, and equanimity; so that we always feel prepossessed in his favor. The ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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
... 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 of Parliament are invited ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... middle class (from which England's greatness springs), claims thee as its own, tell to all around the truth which tells of Britain's shame—that the Irishwoman is forced to herd with cattle! Plead, and say—Am I not a woman, and is she not my sister? And by degrees thy ...
— Facts for the Kind-Hearted of England! - As to the Wretchedness of the Irish Peasantry, and the Means for their Regeneration • Jasper W. Rogers
... working man?" echoed Mr. Godall. "Suppose a rural dean to be unfrocked, does he fall to be a major? suppose a captain were cashiered, would he fall to be a puisne judge? The ignorance of your middle class surprises me. Outside itself, it thinks the world to lie quite ignorant and equal, sunk in a common degradation; but to the eye of the observer, all ranks are seen to stand in ordered hierarchies, and each adorned with its particular aptitudes and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these proceedings and expressing their opinion as to whether their association should pass under the control of men entirely unconnected with the Craft. But no, the leaders of the new movement all appear to have belonged to the middle class, nor from this moment do either masons or architects seem to have played any prominent part ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... neutralists probably included the larger proportion of 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 ...
— 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 Opera at Dresden at a salary of L225 a year, with a pension. This was a first-rate permanent appointment in the service of the Saxon State, carrying an assured professional position and livelihood with it In 1848, the year of revolutions, the discontented middle class, unable to rouse the Church-and-State governments of the day from their bondage to custom, caste, and law by appeals to morality or constitutional agitation for Liberal reforms, made common cause with the starving wage-working class, and resorted to armed ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... their daily bread—who may suffer and starve; but who, if by any little saving of a better time they can manage just to buy bread, shall be precisely where they were, practically, when the storm shall have blown over. Between these lies the great middle class—among whom, as on the middle ground, the world's great battle is continually waging—of persons who are neither rich nor poor; who have neither secured fortunes to fall back upon, nor yet the independence of their hands to turn to, when business and its income fail. This is ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... which prevails in official and literary families? Not to speak of the various official and literary families spoken about in these anecdotes, take now our own immediate case as an instance. We're only such a middle class household, and yet we've got none of those occurrences; so don't let her go on spinning these endless yarns. We must on no account have any of these stories told us! Why, even the maids themselves don't ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the 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 ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... 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, is fraught ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... plane of theories, and we can remain on the level of observable facts. We have to question men who take a very active part in the real revolutionary movement amidst the proletariat, men who do not aspire to climb into the middle class and whose mind is not dominated by corporative prejudices. These men may be deceived about an infinite number of political, economical, or moral questions; but their testimony is decisive, sovereign, and irrefutable ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... conventions of courtly love, and informs the troubadour that her husband is a better man than he and that she will have nothing to do with him. The poem is nothing but a jeu d'esprit based upon the contrast between troubadour sentiments and the honest but unpoetical views of the middle class; it is interesting to philologists as containing one of the earliest known specimens of Italian dialect. An example of the Tuscan dialect is also found in the descort by Raimbaut. This is a poem in irregular metre, intended to show the perturbation of the poet's mind. Raimbaut increased this ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... special terms to enrich 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
... human, for our present purposes. We deal chiefly with the wilder and more aerial forms of superstition; not so far off from fleshly nature as the purely allegoric—not so near as the penal, the purgatorial, the penitential. In this middle class, 'Gabriel's hounds'—the 'phantom ship'—the gloomy legends of the charcoal burners in the German forests—and the local or epichorial superstitions from every district of Europe, come forward by thousands, attesting ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... emulation; a Montreal association was formed, under 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... fiction which Richardson and Warburton recognized—that there is power in a detailed picture of the private life of the middle class—had been suggested earlier. Mrs. Manley could not voice it, at least not in Queen Zarah, where the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Godolphln, and Queen Anne were to be leading characters. But her sometime-friend Richard Steele could. Having laughed in The Tender Husband (1705) at a girl whose ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... Marian with increasing curiosity. To him she was a new and very interesting type. He had seen no such vivacity and freedom abroad, and his experience led him to misunderstand her. "She is of the genus American girl, middle class," he thought, "who, by her beauty and the unconventionality of her drawing-room, has become a quasi-belle. None of these men would think of marrying her, unless it is little Strahan, and he wouldn't five years hence. Yet she is piquant and fascinating ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... middle class, we find the mistress's time largely taken up with directing the servants and bargaining with the tradesmen, who in many cases bring their goods round from house to house. The lady of the house takes care to lock up everything after the supplies for the day have been given out, and the ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... fifty. Man of 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
... means an uncommon trait of Canadian character. In families belonging more especially to the middle class, who have raised themselves from a lower to a higher grade, the mother, if left in poor circumstances, almost invariably holds a subordinate position in her wealthier son or daughter's family. She superintends the servants, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the aristocracy, which consists of the high born animals, the middle class and the low down, common herd, and when you go among the animals as strangers you are received just as you would be in society. If you are properly introduced to the elephants by the elephant keeper, who vouches for your standing and honor, ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... of the social unrest must seek for its source in all three classes of society! Two classes are employer and employee, the third is the great middle class, looking on. What is the relationship between the dominating employing figure in American industrial life ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... first resolved to write the book, I tried to realize to myself what the commonest type of English boy of the upper middle class was, so far as my experience went; and to that type I have throughout adhered, trying simply to give a good specimen of the genus. I certainly have placed him in the country, and scenes which I know best myself, for the simple reason, that I knew them better than any others, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... 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 such things as an artistic ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... 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, ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... tell me about her impresses me favorably. She seems to have the feelings of a lady; and though we must face the fact that in England her income would hardly maintain her in the lower middle class— ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... the decrease." "These emigrants of the present day consist not as formerly of poor people of the lower orders, who turn their backs on the German fatherland, or liberal declaimers, dreaming of an ideal of freedom which could scarcely be realized in Utopia, but of sober excellent families of the middle class, who, free from all delusive fancies, do not expect to find in the western world wealth and honorable offices, but desire only to inhabit a land, wherein they may dwell quietly and happily with their children." "What the German wants is room—a new broad field for his abilities—and this America ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... 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 pore white trash, ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... PAW—"The middle class consists of people who are not poor enough to accept charity and not rich enough to ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... feet) of the best land should yield to the owner a revenue of five bags of rice per annum; each of these bags holds four to (a to is rather less than half an imperial bushel), and is worth at present (1868) three riyos, or about sixteen shillings; land of the middle class should yield a revenue of three or four bags. The rent is paid either in rice or in money, according to the actual price of the grain, which varies considerably. It is due in the eleventh month of the year, when the crops have all been gathered, and ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... of the coupe, then the middle class of the interieure, and lastly, the tiers etat of the rotonde, with its melange of Jew money-lenders, under-officers and their wives, a Norman nurse with a high cap and a red jupe; while, to close the procession, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... assaults, burglaries and rapine as daily news. The French law required a civil ritual for marriage, and Tetuanui tied the legal knots in his district. I was at the chefferie when a union was performed. The bride and groom were of the middle class of prosperous landholders. They arrived in an automobile wonderfully adorned with flowers, with great bouquets of roses and ferns on the lamps. They were accompanied by cars and carriages filled with their families and friends. The bride was in a white-lace dress from Paris, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... theory," I said, "is that the people who still have this most precious possession don't want to keep it in the least. Nobody ever heard of the Irish-speaking peasants taking the smallest interest in their language. The whole revival business is the work of an English-speaking middle class, who never stop asking the Government to pay them for ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... Paris; 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... corrupted, to use Machiavelli's phrase, in their old organization of the Popolo and Commune, they fell into the hands of tyrants, who employed the prestige of their party, the indifference of the Vigliacchi, and the peace-loving instincts of the middle class for the consolidation of their selfish autocracy.[1] Placing himself above the law, manipulating the machinery of the State for his own ends, substituting the will of a single ruler for the clash of hostile passions ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity of Spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if to run against a Working Man involves a gash; if collision with an Officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere touch from the vertex of a Private Soldier brings with it danger ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... Amsterdam beer a man may venture to 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
... Formery entertained him with anecdotes of his professional 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 discord ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... man who was knocked down in Charing Cross Road by a motor-scooter was one of the middle class, and so could not afford to have it done properly by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... of the two poets' lives had been not unlike. Like Virgil, Horace sprang from the ranks of the provincial lower middle class, in whom the virtues of industry, frugality, and sense were generally accompanied by little grace or geniality. But he was exceptionally fortunate in his father. This excellent man, who is always spoken of by his son with a deep respect and affection, was a freedman ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... The middle class, as ever the true conservators of society, seeing this miserable state of affairs, attempted to remedy it. Not fully understanding the danger of such a procedure, they allowed the degenerate element to share in ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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 State agriculture in Russia comes ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... and powerful, left-handed, with something more than a layman's knowledge of surgery, you had better not trouble about him," said Malcolm Sage quietly. "You might also note that the murderer belongs to the upper, or middle class, has an iron nerve, and ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... 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. ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... new thought was so potent with a class who in the Tudor days had made up the London mob, and whose signature, on the rare occasions when anybody wanted it, had been a mark, the middle class, including professional men, felt it infinitely more. In the early training with many, as with Milton's father, music was a passion; there was nothing illiberal or narrow. In Milton's case he writes: "My father ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... your world," she said. "I know the world of the poor and the middle class, but I ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... they were the most eccentric of human beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom,—Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry Tilney, Mr. Edward Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper part of the middle class. They have been all liberally educated. They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are all in love. Not any one of them has any hobby-horse, to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has any ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and councillors, and a subject class of productive labourers. When, however, he turns from the ideal to practical politics, and considers merely how to avoid the worst extremes of party antagonism, his solution is the simple and familiar one of the preponderance of the middle class. The same view was dominant both in French and English politics from the year 1830 onwards, and is only now being thrust aside by the democratic ideal. In Greece it was never realised except as a passing phase ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the 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
... you got them off that they were defeated. I wish the reader to understand particularly, that I am not speaking now of the well-bred Americans, but of that portion which would with us be considered as on a par with the middle class of shop-keepers; for I had a very extensive acquaintance. My amusement was, to make some comparison between the two countries, which I knew would immediately bring on the conflict I desired; and not without danger, for I sometimes expected, in the ardour of their patriotism, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... hardship which we drink together will turn out to be the very draught which we need? Has there not crept a softness over the nation, a passion for amusement, a love of luxury among the rich, and of mere physical comfort among the middle class?" ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... visitors Duncombe recognized immediately. It was Monsieur Louis. Of the other two one was a Frenchman, a somewhat sombre-looking person, in a black beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses, the other as unmistakably an Englishman of the lower middle class. His broad shoulders and somewhat stiff bearing seemed to suggest some sort of drill. Looking them over, Duncombe found himself instinctively wondering whether the personal strength of these two, which was obvious, might become a factor in the ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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, who came here as coolies, are beginning to follow the commercial ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... who figures the matter out that a 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 as ...
— Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand • David G. McMillan
... power as possible should be granted to the Government. Thus the Government, the rich people, and the bourgeoisie have interest in keeping the lowest class happy, and in increasing the number of the middle class, which is the true strength of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... intelligence and virtue. The Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles, secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... surface was in inferior cultivation, or altogether neglected, than at present.[342] But, however small their number in proportion to the papists, the Huguenots, from their superior industry and intelligence, from the circumstance that their strength lay in the sturdy middle class and in the nobility, including little of the rabble of the cities and none of that of Paris,[343] were a party that naturally awakened the jealousy of the queen. We need make little account of any exasperation in consequence of such silly devices ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... "others who consider war as 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 and the indemnity of war. These, too, think ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... Beauty and the claims of Freedom on a possessive world are the main prepossessions of the Forsyte Saga, it cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class. As the old Egyptians placed around their mummies the necessaries of a future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the, figures of Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon and James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little life here-after, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that I am going 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
... remember 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 way of their feet in the world of men. And ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... to form the character of Poulett Thomson. His well-merited titles, Baron Sydenham and Toronto, tend to obscure the fact that he was essentially a member of the great middle class, a civilian who had never worn a sword or {36} a military uniform. He represented that element in English life which is always enriching the House of Peers by the addition of sheer intellectual eminence, ...
— The Winning of Popular Government - A Chronicle of the Union of 1841 • Archibald Macmechan
... 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 ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... appeal at once to our respect and pity. A flavour of the old school, a touch of something different in their manner—which is freer and rounder, if they come of what is called a good family, and often more timid and precise if they are of the middle class—serves, in these days, to accentuate the difference of age and add a distinction to gray hairs. But their superiority is founded more deeply than by outward marks or gestures. They are before us in the march of man; they have more or less ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... that of the more servile bhearers, was a fair type of the pure Hindoo manners of that well-bred middle class which clings with orthodox conservatism to its dear traditions, and spurns as unconstitutional all upstart and dandy amendments of the old social and religious law. He had invariably one salutation for an equal,—the right hand gently raised, and the head as gently inclined ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... of the French nobility and the middle class of citizens were reduced to a servile attendance on the court, as the only means of advancement and reward. Every species of industry and merit in these classes was sedulously discouraged; and the motive of honorable competition for honorable things, being withdrawn, no pursuit or occupation ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 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)
... its present position in the 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 or Twenty-Five ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... long sight better if you did. Cold cream, too. You wouldn't have any wrinkles at your age, if you weren't so damn respectable-aristocratic, you call it. It's just middle class. And as out of date as speech without slang. As for me, I'd paint my lips as Aileen does, only I don't like the taste, and they're too red, anyhow. It's much smarter to make up than not to. Times ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... and Campbell, in law; and of Addison, Thomson, Goldsmith, Coleridge, and Tennyson, in literature. Lord Hardinge, Colonel Edwardes, and Major Hodson, so honourably known in Indian warfare, were also the sons of clergymen. Indeed, the empire of England in India was won and held chiefly by men of the middle class—such as Clive, Warren Hastings, and their successors—men for the most part bred in factories and trained to ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... effect of this insurrection, commonly called Shay's Rebellion, are thus described by a recent writer. The jealousy felt toward the statesmen of the Republic, or toward the upper by the middle class—if the terms may be allowed—was likely to operate fatally in marring the project of a Constitution, and rendering any innovation for the purpose impracticable; since the dissentient States were resolved not to choose delegates, or accede ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... the marshes, and droves of shaggy little Welsh ponies, no higher than Merrylegs; and hundreds of cart horses of all sorts, some of them with their long tails braided up and tied with scarlet cord; and a good many like myself, handsome and high-bred, but fallen into the middle class, through some accident or blemish, unsoundness of wind, or some other complaint. There were some splendid animals quite in their prime, and fit for anything, they were throwing out their legs and showing ...
— Black Beauty, Young Folks' Edition • Anna Sewell
... 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
... 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; in short, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... 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 ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... that the real loss of France must be measured. France was incomparably more weakened than if two hundred thousand citizens had been taken at hazard from the Catholic mass of the nation. The Protestants were very superior, on the average, if not to the Catholic middle class of Paris and the principal centres of French civilization, at least to the mass of the people, and the emigrants were the best of the Protestants. A multitude of useful men, among them many superior men, left a frightful void in France, and went to swell the forces of Protestant nations. France ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... before been thrown with a woman of her class. Those of his first social 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 ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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
... 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 against ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... enterprises would be concentrated with fewer and fewer men, while history has taken 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 ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... to have represented anyone who has ever been known in life by Doctor Geley.[8] My impression after examining them is that they are much more likely to be within the knowledge of the subject, being girls of the French lower middle class type, such as Eva was, I should imagine, in the habit of meeting. It should be added that Eva herself appears in the photograph as well as the simulacra of humanity. The faces are, on the whole, both pretty and piquant, though of a rather worldly and unrefined type. The latter adjective ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... probabilities, not at fancies and predilections. I am afraid "leases" is the likelier word. It has also a special fitness, which has not been hitherto remarked. Many of the wealthy people of Elizabeth's reign, particularly in the middle class, were "fellows that had had leases." It will be recollected that extravagant leases or fines were among the methods by which the possessions of the church were so grievously dilapidated in the age of the Reformation. Those who had a little money to invest, could not ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... twenty years later, when I met him in London, after his wife's death; he was quiet and sedate, with close-cut silvery hair and pointed beard, and the rather stout, well-dressed figure of a British gentleman of the sober middle class. It is difficult to harmonize either of these outsides with the poet within—that remarkable imagination, intellect, and analytical faculty which have made him one of the men of the century. There was a genial charm in Browning, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... place the destinies of the Islands in the hands of an oligarchy. But, in 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
... inquest was held by Mr. Michael Fullam, Coroner, at Aughaward, near Ballinale in this County, on the body of a respectable middle class farmer named James Prunty. It appears the deceased, a feeble old man of 76 years of age, went into an out-house occupied by his own bull for the purpose of cleaning it out, and while in the act of doing so, the bull broke its chain and turned on him. By the interposition ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe
... 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 ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... 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
... was born 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
... ambitions to put an end to class warfare in Germany. To this end he begins, with his usual tact, by denouncing the capitalists (that is to say; the wealth of the middle class) to the workers, and then holds up the scandalous luxury of the aristocracy in the army to the contempt of ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... 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
... chief offices of the temple were 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 fact, that under this regime of an annual pontificate, ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... become of the goats, but how are the alpacas to be dealt with?"[59] The alpaca, it should be said, is an animal possessing some of the characteristics both of the sheep and the goat, and the meaning of the question is, of course, what is to become of that vast middle class in whose lives sometimes good and sometimes evil ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... far more highly trained, more alert intellectually, more capable of collective action, and more accessible to general ideas, than the less numerous and less important corresponding classes in Britain. This great German middle class is the strength and substance of the new Germany; it has increased proportionally to the classes above and below it, it has developed almost all its characteristics during the last half-century. At its lower fringe it comprehends the skilled and scientifically trained artisans, ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... 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 ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... The middle class included professional men, shopkeepers independent farmers, and skilled craftsmen. Though regarded as inferiors, still they had a chance to rise in the world. If they became rich, they might hope to enter the upper class ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER |
