Evening Post SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1939. A CLASS IN PERIL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 19, 22 July 1939, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1939.

A CLASS IN PERIL

The term "middle class" lias little or no meaning in New Zealand applied to our own people, for "middle" implies an "upper" and a "lower" class, a stratification of society not —or not yet —recognised here any more than an "aristocracy" or a "proletariat." The people of New Zealand are not class-conscious, despite the use of the compound word to denote divisions in the social order which do not really exist and are only a figment of party politics. But in the older countries of Europe there are—or were—definite classes, of which the middle occupies, according to the sociologist, a position of vital importance. Thus Mr. Hilaire Belloc, writing in the "Fortnightly" recently, under the title "The Death of the Middle Class," says this: A process is now continuous all over Europe. The middle class is dying, and with, it our civilisation is dying, too. For the middle class made and, till yesterday, still sustained, our culture. In so sweeping a statement everything depends on what the writer means by "middle class," for the English language, above all others, is used loosely and vaguely, and so is apt to lack precision. And so Mr. Belloc proceeds to define his terms. By "death" he means "impendingdisappearance:," not immediate disappearance itself. "I mean," he says, "the rapid decay in power and in the chances of survival . . . the loss of those characters whereby a social class perpetuates itself." What is Mr. Belloc's "middle class"? He begins by describing it rather than defining it as that highly cultivated body of men and women who until within living memory gave their tone to most of our Western countries and particularly to France and England; the people who were not, save at some removes and indirectly, connected with the territorial aristocracy or with the great mercantile and banking fortunes which have long been indistinguishable from such aristocracy. It is not suggested by the writer of this obituary of the middle class that either it or its relics are a closed body. It recruits from above and below and itself supplies recruits to the upper and lower classes. Over both it exercises a profound influence. Mr. Belloc comes closer to a definition when he says in the past tense: The characteristic of that vital class was the enjoyment of wealth sufficient to secure independence but not so great as to permit idleness. A certain measure of need spurred its energy, but that need was not so acute as to dull perception or to forbid those humanities which are the necessary foundation of a liberal mind. It is clear then that to be independent an individual or a class must have means and that implies property. This^ is specially emphasised by Mr. Belloc as essential to the preservation of the middle class. Private property, he says, is the doctrine whereby the independence of the family and of the individual is maintained. In an ideal State (impossible •of course of attainment) we should have property so well divided that every family was guaranteed of economic independence through property. For the alternative to welldistributed property is always, invariably and of necessity (in the long run), slavery. A citizen is not a citizen unless he owns. Consequently,. Mr. Belloc deplores bitterly the drift of property into the hands of the State or "under control of a restricted dominating class, masters of the rest." Surveying the history of Europe and Western civilisation, Mr. Belloc sees in the middle class the fountain of culture and the reservoir of talent. It was certainly true of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Its authors and artists, poets and orators, sprang almost wholly from the middle class. The Greek dramatists, tragic and comic, and the Greek orators were men of the middle class, and in Rome from Cato to Cicero, Horace, •Virgil, Livy, the middle class predominated. When the middle class decayed and disappeared in the Roman Empire the systematisers like the Antonine Emperors and, later, Diocletian were unable to save the State from its decline and fall. Why they failed was well illustrated in a letter in "The Post" this week quoting from a recent work "The New Deal in Old Rome." No amount of machinery will save a State when the men are missing. In no country has the middle class produced a richer fruit than in England. Scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, professional men of all kinds—their name is legion. And it is true that the influence of the middle class was at its greatest when the growth of private property in the nineteenth century followed the Industrial Revolution. The whole tone of the Victorian Age was set by the middle class t and whatever may be

said of its defects—its prudery, for instance—it was a great and virile age when Britain was unchallenged throughout the world. To what does the middle class owe its decline? "The causes of its decay," says Mr. Belloc, "are not material—social causes never are." He puts it down to the growth of greed, for, says he, it was greed that bred universal usury, the consequent enormity of taxation through National Debts, exploitation, and gambling—all that has brought us to the stage we have unfortunatelyreached. Would it not be truer to say that when the material foundations of a middle class are destroyed by excessive State and local taxation, on the one hand, and, on the other, by the spread of industrial monopolies fatal to the smaller independent firms of middle-class owners, the class itself, losing its sustenance, begins to wilt and wither? It was long ago said ; bf the English middle class that it was caught between the upper and lower millstones of society and was being ground to dust. The Great War precipitated the process by its destruction of life and property and its disturbance of the established 'order in which the middle class [founded its security. The results in J the post-War decay of culture are j obvious. Standards of tone and taste iare lost. This is all too apparent {in the dictatorship countries of Europe, where the middle class is really dead. There is a lesson in all this to New Zealand. The middle class is the first to surfer from the aggrandizement of the State and the growth of taxation. If, as Mr. Belloc says, the middle class is vital to culture and civilisation, and property is its base, it may never have a chance to live in New Zealand.