Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1919 — ALL IN ONE CLASS [ARTICLE]

ALL IN ONE CLASS

Classification “Bourgeois” Fits Every American. In Reality It Is a Term of the Highest Honor, Though Anarchistic Enemies of All Society '- • -■.■■■■ Will Deny It. - * •■■ The average American’s understanding of the word “bourgeois” Is reflected in a common saying which has passed from the country newspaper office into ordinary speech: “You can’t run a nonpareil newspaper In a bourgeois town.” The word, so far as it is used in its typographical sense (and pronounced “burjoice”), is synonymous with rusticity and. lack of enterprise. For the term in its European, social sense, signifying a trading middle class, the average American has never had any use at all, because he had never been aware of “any such division or classification of the population. If he knows the word at all it is only through his reading of European books or 8, papers. In its continental European meaning it is entirely strange to our own usage. But it Is now made familiar through the attacks of bolshevik! and Spartacus people upon all the elements of society except their own. Another word, in their hostile and hating sense, is flagrantly misused. In strictness, the term means the trading middleclass citizen. Anciently, it included artisans as well if they dwelt in cities and lived in comfortable houses. The word distinguishes certain people from royalties, from the nobility, the gentry —or at least the upper gentry—on the one hand, and from country people and poor town laborers on the other. It is the same as “burgher” or citizen, and Shakespeare used “citizen” in exactly the same sense, as when he makes Jaques speak of the deer sweeping along “full of pasture,” as “fat and greasy citizens,” or when Imogen, employing the word adjectively, a s we do“bourgeof s,” vied ares

that she is “not so citizen a wanton as to seem to die ere sick.” In Moliere’s “Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” the meaning of the word is dramatized In a comedy of the attempted evolution (often accomplished) of the “citizen” into the “gentleman.” But all this true and ancient meaning is swept aside by the bolshevist, who makes the word signify aU people but himself. For him, there are in the world but the proletariat worker, the moneyless industrial wage-jecefver, on the one hand, and the "bourgeois” on the other, and he makes the hated classification include czars and kings, nobles, merchants, artisans, even peasants—all who have accumulated a few rubles or marks, and who hope by their Industry to accumulate a few more. We are, then, in America, all bourgeois—except s- few agitators on the East side of New York and other centers of imported discontent. . From Wilson down to the poorest farmer, and Including Morgan and Rockefeller and the man who sells apples and oranges from a handcart, we are nothing but bourgeois. ‘T thank thee. Jew, for teaching me that word.” "Bourgeois” has become a term of the highest honor. It represents America’s triumphant struggle with the forces of nature.