Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 April 1885 — Who Are the Better Classes? [ARTICLE]

Who Are the Better Classes?

An exchange very pertinently remarks: “We hear a great deal of the “better classes.” This orator speaks of the uprising of the better classes, and that newspaper refers to the candidate who is supported by the better classes. Tho’tless speakers and writers are continually sounding the praises of the better classes. One hears something about the better classes wherever he goes. It is where the better classes live, what the better classes are doing, what the better classes are saying, and who is in favor with the better classes. The better classes must be very prominent citizens.

“Now, who are the better classes ? Of what does their patent of nobility consist? What makes them better than any other classes, and by what right do we speak of classes at all in this free republic, where every man is a sovereign, and where pride, name and station do not in any legal manner effect universal equality ? Many a glib talker, if stopped peremptorily with the phrase “better classes” still lingering on his tongue and asked to whom he referred wo’d suffer some embarrassment. In the vulgar parlance of the day the “better classes” are not exactly what the words would seem to signify. Did anybody ever hear a person refer to a lot of hard-working and honest men as belonging to the better classes ? Would your downtown snob go to the quiet streets in various parts of town where humble homes stand closely side by side and point them out as the residences of the better classes? Can it be imagined that any thoughtless person would designate the thousands of men who throng the street cars in the early morning as members of the better classes, or wo’d it be customary for him to invade the small homes where one tired woman is wife, mother and servant and point her out as a member of the better classes? No, to all of these. These are not the better classes of whom we hear so much. The better classes, who assume to speak as one having authority, and who constitute in a vague sort of way an idol before whom many light-brained people bend the knee, are exclusively the rich and proud. It matters not what their characters may be or how they may have earned their money. It makes no difference whether they rob and oppress the poor or not, and if it was known that their fortunes were based on fraud, blackmail or downright theft the fact would not be laid up against them. The better classes are they who wear fine clothes, have clean and jeweled fingers, ride in carriages, live in choice neighborhoods and occupy large houses, enjoy a retinue of servants and generally maintain an attitude of exclusiveness and of half-way contempt toward their fellow beings as work hard for a living. * Since wealth and pride constitute the chief requisites for membership of the “better classes,” what an abominable thing it is to hear an ordinary clerk, bookkeeper, mechanic, laborer or teamster prating about the better classes and taking some glory to himself because he is acting with them. If the people who have been described are the better classes, then hundreds of thousands of honest, and hardy people who pay taxes and make good soldiers are inferior in some way, and the man who does not own a million and who glibly speaks of the better classes is tho’tlessly but none the less certainly making an ass of himself. ' There are no classes in this country, better or otherwise. Every good citizen, whether rich or poor, proud or humble, stands on an equality with all the others, has equal rights and is in every way entitled to as much respect as anybody else. The attempt to array one section of the people against another section, styling one the “better class” and the other by inference the criminal class, is an outrage on citizenship, a blow at liberty and practically that honest

poverty is a crime. The expression has become too common. Even the babes and sucklings echo it. — It is snobbery pure and simple, and no proper opportunity to rebuke it ought ever to be permitted to go by unimproved.”