DEVELOPING SOCIAL ELEMENTS
extent still is—the multitudinous living machinery of the old social order; it carried, cropped, tilled, built, and made. And, directing and sometimes owning this human machinery, there has always been a superior class, bound usually by a point of honour not to toil, often warlike, often equestrian, and sometimes cultivated. In England this is the gentility, in most European countries it is organised as a nobility; it is represented in the history of India by the "twice born" castes, and in China—the most philosophically conceived and the most stably organised social system the old order ever developed—it finds its equivalent in the members of a variously buttoned mandarinate, who ride, not on horses, but on a once adequate and still respectable erudition. These two primary classes may and do become in many cases complicated by subdivisions; the peasant class may split into farmers and labourers, the gentlemen admit a series of grades and orders, kings, dukes, earls, and the like; but the broad distinction remains intact, as though it was a distinction residing in the nature of things.[1]
From the very dawn of history until the first beginnings of mechanism in the eighteenth century, this simple scheme of orders was the universal organisation of all but savage humanity, and the chief
- ↑ To these two primary classes the more complicated societies have added others. There is the priest, almost always in the social order of the pre-railway period an integral part, a functional organ of the social body, and there are the lawyer and the physician. And in the towns—constituting, indeed, the towns— there appear, as an outgrowth of the toiling class, a little emancipated from the gentleman's direct control, the craftsman, the merchant, and the trading sailor, essentially accessory classes, producers of, and dealers in, the accessories of life, and mitigating and clouding at very slightly that broad duality.
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