a hand to the humble operation of uprooting certain definite evils” (such as church-rates and others), and that therefore “the believers in action grow impatient” with me.  The line, again, of a still unsatisfied seeker which I have followed, the idea of self-transformation, of growing towards some measure of sweetness and light not yet reached, is evidently at clean variance with the perfect self-satisfaction current in my class, the middle-class, [96] and may serve to indicate in me, therefore, the extreme defect of this feeling.  But these confessions, though salutary, are bitter and unpleasant.

To pass, then, to the working-class.  The defect of this class would be the falling short in what Mr. Frederic Harrison calls those “bright powers of sympathy and ready powers of action,” of which we saw in Mr. Odger the virtuous mean, and in Mr. Bradlaugh the excess.  The working-class is so fast growing and rising at the present time, that instances of this defect cannot well be now very common.  Perhaps Canning’s “Needy Knife-grinder” (who is dead, and therefore cannot be pained at my taking him for an illustration) may serve to give us the notion of defect in the essential quality of a working-class; or I might even cite (since, though he is alive in the flesh, he is dead to all heed of criticism) my poor old poaching friend, Zephaniah Diggs, who, between his hare-snaring and his gin-drinking, has got his powers of sympathy quite dulled and his powers of action in any great movement of his class hopelessly impaired.  But examples of this defect belong, as I have said, to a bygone age rather than to the present.

[97] The same desire for clearness, which has led me thus to extend a little my first analysis of the three great classes of English society, prompts me also to make my nomenclature for them a little fuller, with a view to making it thereby more clear and manageable.  It is awkward and tiresome to be always saying the aristocratic class, the middle-class, the working-class.  For the middle-class, for that great body which, as we know, “has done all the great things that have been done in all departments,” and which is to be conceived as chiefly moving between its two cardinal points of Mr. Bazley and the Rev. W. Cattle, but inclining, in the mass, rather towards the latter than the former—­for this class we have a designation which now has become pretty well known, and which we may as well still keep for them, the designation of Philistines.  What this term means I have so often explained that I need not repeat it here.  For the aristocratic class, conceived mainly as a body moving between the two cardinal points of Lord Elcho and Sir Thomas Bateson, but as a whole nearer to the latter than the former, we have as yet got no special designation.  Almost [98] all my attention has naturally been concentrated on my own class, the middle-class, with which I am in closest sympathy, and which has been, besides, the great power