And the lower class see before them the aristocratic class, and its civilization, such as it is, even infinitely more out of their reach than out of that of the middle class; while the life of the middle class, with its unlovely types of religion, thought, beauty, and manners, has naturally, in general, no great attractions for them either.  And so they, too, are thrown back upon themselves; upon their beer, their gin, and their fun.  Now, then, you will understand what I meant by saying that our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower.

And the greater the inequality the more marked is its bad action upon the middle and lower classes.  In Scotland the landed aristocracy fills the scene, as is well known, still more than in England; the other classes are more squeezed back and effaced.  And the social civilization of the lower middle class and of the poorest class, in Scotland, is an example of the consequences.  Compared with the same class even in England, the Scottish lower middle class is most visibly, to vary Mr. Charles Sumner’s phrase, less well-bred, less careful in personal habits and in social conventions, less refined.  Let any one who doubts it go, after issuing from the aristocratic solitudes which possess Loch Lomond, let him go and observe the shopkeepers and the middle class in Dumbarton, and Greenock, and Gourock, and the places along the mouth of the Clyde.  And for the poorest class, who that has seen it can ever forget the hardly human horror, the abjection and uncivilizedness of Glasgow?

What a strange religion, then, is our religion of inequality!  Romance often helps a religion to hold its ground, and romance is good in its way; but ours is not even a romantic religion.  No doubt our aristocracy is an object of very strong public interest.  The Times itself bestows a leading article by way of epithalamium on the Duke of Norfolk’s marriage.  And those journals of a new type, full of talent, and which interest me particularly because they seem as if they were written by the young lion[485] of our youth,—­the young lion grown mellow and, as the French say, viveur, arrived at his full and ripe knowledge of the world, and minded to enjoy the smooth evening of his days,—­those journals, in the main a sort of social gazette of the aristocracy, are apparently not read by that class only which they most concern, but are read with great avidity by other classes also.  And the common people, too, have undoubtedly, as Mr. Gladstone says, a wonderful preference for a lord.  Yet our aristocracy, from the action upon it of the Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, and the political necessities of George the Third, is for the imagination a singularly modern and uninteresting one.  Its splendor of station, its wealth, show, and luxury, is then what the other classes really admire in it; and this is not an elevating admiration.  Such an admiration will never lift