196 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
domestic service, on the only just and helpful basis, true womanly regard for woman. After all, accident rather than inherent right to the world's best gifts lavishes on one daughter of Eve culture and broad opportunity, while goading another through poverty to incessant drudgery. Some of the richest men today may from fire, flood or fraud be paupers tomorrow and their children may be reduced to the workbench. I have seen just such delicately nurtured women stooping over machines in many big factories, their fortune gone, and themselves, like most graduates of female schools, without a single developed talent or practical resource for gaining a livelihood in higher pursuits. Had the grandfathers of our aristocracy of mere wealth remained in the old world throttled by class distinctions, the sons of these men might have been only small shopkeepers or humble artisans whose daughters would now look at labor problems from a six-loom weaver's standpoint, would groan from these problems in a tenement, or starve with them in a garret. Hard travail crushing out all but the material element of their existence, would such women be conscious of those higher needs the lack of which is flung as a reproach in the face of the poor ?
Vulgarity is not a cause but an effect. Most working people desire money for wherewithal to live before they can think about manners ; and to those who have never had refinements of living it is no actual hardship, as we conceive it, to be shut out from the beautiful, delicate and stately. The outlook would be more hopeful did all feel it a hardship. Only when present conven- tional and economic differences shall have been leveled will a new growth of spiritual tenderness appear. The average wage- earner of today makes, all things considered, wonderfully much of his small resources. But, being without ballast from experi- ence in any pursuit more responsible, without the wisdom born of gradual use of unwonted powers, this average wage-earner, if suddenly transformed into the creature of the reformer's standards, would be a wholly disappointing being, out of place in his sur- roundings, at war with his kindred, a useless incumbrance. Such in truth is somewhat the present tendency of public school
