practice common—­and all America was common.  But through the private ownership of land that had resulted from the neglect of feudal obligations in Britain and the utter want of political foresight in the Americas, large masses of property had become artificially stable in the hands of a small minority, to whom it was necessary to mortgage all new public and private enterprises, and who were held together not by any tradition of service and nobility but by the natural sympathy of common interests and a common large scale of living.  It was a class without any very definite boundaries; vigorous individualities, by methods for the most part violent and questionable, were constantly thrusting themselves from insecurity to security, and the sons and daughters of secure people, by marrying insecurity or by wild extravagance or flagrant vice, would sink into the life of anxiety and insufficiency which was the ordinary life of man.  The rest of the population was landless and, except by working directly or indirectly for the Secure, had no legal right to exist.  And such was the shallowness and insufficiency of our thought, such the stifled egotism of all our feelings before the Last Days, that very few indeed of the Secure could be found to doubt that this was the natural and only conceivable order of the world.

It is the life of the Insecure under the old order that I am displaying, and I hope that I am conveying something of its hopeless bitterness to you, but you must not imagine that the Secure lived lives of paradisiacal happiness.  The pit of insecurity below them made itself felt, even though it was not comprehended.  Life about them was ugly; the sight of ugly and mean houses, of ill-dressed people, the vulgar appeals of the dealers in popular commodities, were not to be escaped.  There was below the threshold of their minds an uneasiness; they not only did not think clearly about social economy but they displayed an instinctive disinclination to think.  Their security was not so perfect that they had not a dread of falling towards the pit, they were always lashing themselves by new ropes, their cultivation of “connexions,” of interests, their desire to confirm and improve their positions, was a constant ignoble preoccupation.  You must read Thackeray to get the full flavor of their lives.  Then the bacterium was apt to disregard class distinctions, and they were never really happy in their servants.  Read their surviving books.  Each generation bewails the decay of that “fidelity” of servants, no generation ever saw.  A world that is squalid in one corner is squalid altogether, but that they never understood.  They believed there was not enough of anything to go round, they believed that this was the intention of God and an incurable condition of life, and they held passionately and with a sense of right to their disproportionate share.  They maintained a common intercourse as “Society” of all who were practically secure, and their choice of that word is exhaustively eloquent of the quality of their philosophy.  But, if you can master these alien ideas upon which the old system rested, just in the same measure will you understand the horror these people had for marriages with the Insecure.  In the case of their girls and women it was extraordinarily rare, and in the case of either sex it was regarded as a disastrous social crime.  Anything was better than that.