I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It has responsibility for homes - homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual. Now, what is the value of this middle class, so defined and described?įirst, it has a "stake in the country". We cannot go wrong right up to the peace treaty and expect suddenly thereafter to go right. We must watch each, remembering always that whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, the foundations of whatever new order is to come after the war are inevitably being laid down now. In point of political, industrial and social theory and practice, there are great delays in time of war. You may say to me, "Why bring this matter up at this stage when we are fighting a war, the result of which we are all equally concerned?" My answer is that I am bringing it up because under the pressure of war we may, if we are not careful - if we are not as thoughtful as the times will permit us to be - inflict a fatal injury upon our own backbone. The communist has always hated what he calls the "bourgeoisie", because he sees clearly the existence of one has kept British countries from revolution, while the substantial absence of one in feudal France at the end of the eighteenth century and in Tsarist Russia at the end of the last war made revolution easy and indeed inevitable. They are not sufficiently lacking in individualism to be organised for what in these days we call "pressure politics." And yet, as I have said, they are the backbone of the nation. They are taken for granted by each political party in turn. They are not rich enough to have individual power. They are envied by those whose benefits are largely obtained by taxing them. They are for the most part unorganised and unself-conscious. These are, in the political and economic sense, the middle class. These exclusions being made, I include the intervening range - the kind of people I myself represent in Parliament - salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers and so on. We cannot exclude them from problems of social progress, for one of the prime objects of modern social and political policy is to give them a proper measure of security, and provide the conditions which will enable them to acquire skill and knowledge and individuality. What I am excluding them from is my definition of the middle class. I exclude at the other end of the scale the mass of unskilled people, almost invariably well-organised, and with their wages and conditions safeguarded by popular law. But I exclude them because, in most material difficulties, the rich can look after themselves. I exclude at one end of the scale the rich and powerful: those who control great funds and enterprises, and are as a rule able to protect themselves - though it must be said that in a political sense they have as a rule shown neither comprehension nor competence. We do not have classes here as in England, and therefore the terms do not mean the same so I must define what I mean when I use the expression "middle class." But if we are to talk of classes, then the time has come to say something of the forgotten class - the middle class - those people who are constantly in danger of being ground between the upper and the nether millstones of the false war the middle class who, properly regarded represent the backbone of this country. In a country like Australia the class war must always be a false war. Now, the last thing that I would want to do is to commence or take part in a false war of this kind. He was obviously suffering from what has for years seemed to me to be our greatest political disease - the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on? He sought to divide the people of Australia into classes. His belief, apparently, was that the workers are those who work with their hands. His theme was the importance of doing justice to the workers. Quite recently, a bishop wrote a letter to a great daily newspaper.
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