Note 174 — Chapter VIII

The phrase working classes, applied to the industrial population, seems as inaccurate as the phrase lower orders, applied generally fifty years ago, is obnoxious. The distinction does not lie in this class being working while others are idle people. Something very different indeed is the fact. The tendency of late years has been that professional people should work harder, and working people less, and very few men who live by their profession work fewer hours than the handicraftsmen of our towns. Lord Stanley might have gone even further in his comments on the earnings of the industrial classes. Even putting aside the important consideration of how much the professional man spends of time and money in preparing himself to work at all, a great and ever increasing number of the wage-receiving class have now as good incomes as many hundreds of the less successful classes above them, while their expected or necessary expenditure is in almost all cases very much smaller.