People who ought to know better are continually. worrying themselves grey about tne Natiunal Birth-Rate Commission, writes kK. B. Ince in the "Daily Mirror."
They say that the report of the Commission is most unsatisfactory, especially as regards the middle class, The middle class—if we are to trust the Commission—is doomed.
Taxation, fixed incomes and high prices constitute the dragon that is going to swallow the middle class, which, say the Jere forms the backbone of the country. No doubt that is true. Our great men have nearly all sprung from the middle class. And those who didn't joined the middle class immediately on becoming great.
Look at literature: Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Shakes. peace, Milton. At science: Darwin, Kelvin, Faraday, Newton, Huxley. All middle-class men. And the same is true of art and commerce.
Therefore, argue the Jeremiahs, our country is in danger. The middle class is passing and with its demise will pass our supremacy of intellect. A terrible picture to contemplate.
But there is no need to contemplate it, because it is not true. That time will never arrive. The middle class will never disappear, until the upper, the lower and all the other classes have disappeared.
What is happening is that the constituents which go to form the middle class are changing.
THe Guitr or Snosseny.
Those who shake their heads over the declining birth-rate talk as though the middle class were a distinct caste holding aloof from all other classes. This is not the case.
It is true that the middle class has hitherto been far too exclusive. Probably it is more guilty of snobbery than' any other. Look at the attitude of tue majority of middle class parents towards their children. the expensive conventional middle-class education—_unfitted their sons for any employment ex-copt. the professions or the civil service.
The son of a middle-class father becomes a barrister. He gets few briefs unless he is exceptionally brilliant, and his life is spent in quite unnecessary impecuniosity. But suggest to that father that his son had far better have been apprenticed to a linen draper or a haberdasher and he will stare.
The sons of middle-class parents have found the struggle of life far harder than it need have been owing to the innate snobbery of their class. They have been brought up in the belief that trade—unless conducted on a very large scale—is an occupation unworthy of a gentleman,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.