THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS.

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 3182, 6 January 1928, Page 4

THE NEW MIDDLE CLASS.

In contrast with this struggle for existence, the writer refers to the very considerable class with incomes between £500 and £750 a year. "It is

people with that class of income for whom our British world is being incessantly laid out," he says. "They have a better, a happier, and more varied and amusing time to-day than they ever had before, and they are working with some rapidity a profound social revolution. What we are witnessing is the constriction, almost the strangulation, of the upper middle class and the efflorescence of the lower middle class. Something like a million new houses have been built in England and Wales since the Armistice. The overwhelming majority of them are small houses, usually with a plot of garden attached, the very thing for a couple of modest means. Almost invariably the people who live in them are the people who have bought them. They pay what they can on deposit, and they either borrow the remainder or arrange a mortgage. If we cannot become a nation of agricultural smallholders we seem well on the way to becoming one of small householders. This is a most wholesome development from every standpoint; it adds as nothing else can to social stability and the sense of citizenship. The young couples live simply, and they are below the level where taxation becomes penal. Next to completing the purchase instalments on their house, their great ambition is to fill the garage, even if the nursery has to go empty for a while. But when they have children—and they usually have one or two—they bring them up very sensibly. For amusements these youngpeople do not have to seek far or spend much, nor are they hard to please. Most of all they rely for. their fun on the car they have purchased on the deferred payment system. The extraordinary cheapness of a day's outing in a mass-produced British two-seater approaches the incredible and the amount of healthy Tecreation, of fresh air, new sights an experiences, and, above all, of family companionship, that the motor car has put within the reach of hundreds of thousands, who a generation ago got out of town once a year, entitles it to be called the most blessed social invention of c~r times."