The Conception of the Middle Classes.

This article examines the concept of the middle class. The concept of the middle class is exceedingly elusive, by whatever route one approaches it. Clearly, membership of the middle class, or classes, is not simply a matter of income, either absolutely or of relative income within a particular social structure. Nor is it exclusively a matter of the nature and source of the income received, or of profession or calling. Nor again is it exclusively a matter of education, or of manners; for no definition based on these will avail to mark off one part of the middle classes from the upper class or another from the working class. Nor will it serve to treat the family as a unit; for it is nowadays very common for one child from a working-class household to enter a profession, while another becomes a manual worker, and yet another marries a local shopkeeper, after a spell of either factory or clerical employment. In modem fluid societies, the family ceases in more and more instances to be a unit assignable to a single class. This, of course, is not new, for priesthoods have usually been recruited from a wide variety of social groups; but it is commoner now than ever before, except in pioneering societies such as the U.S. and the British Dominions, not only for the family to be made up of varying class elements, but also for individuals to shift from class to class on their way through life. This does not mean that classes lose reality.