We do well to remind ourselves that the great body of wealth in the country has been built up slowly and honestly by the most laborious means, and accumulated and transmitted by self-sacrificing thrift.  A rich person in nine cases out of ten is merely a capable, careful, saving person, often, too, a person who conducts a difficult calling with a fine sense of personal honor and a high standard of social obligation.  We are too much dazzled by the occasional apparition of the lawyer who has got rich by steering guilty clients past the legal reefs, of the surgeon who plays equally on the fears and the purses of his patients, of the sensational clergyman who has made full coinage of his charlatanism.  All these types exist, and all are highly exceptional.  Most rich persons are self-respecting, have given ample value received for their wealth, and have less reason to apologize for it than most poor folks have to apologize for their poverty.

Furthermore:  for the maintenance of certain humdrum but necessary human virtues, we are dependent upon these middling rich.  It has been frequently remarked that a lord and a working man are likely to agree, as against a bourgeois, in generosity, spontaneous fellowship, and all that goes to make sporting spirit.  The right measure of these qualities makes for charm and genuine fraternity; the excess of these qualities produces an enormous amount of human waste among the wage earners and the aristocrats impartially.  The great body of self-controlled, that is of reasonably socialized people, must be sought between these two extremes.  In short the building up of ideals of discipline and of habits of efficiency and of good manners and of human respect is very largely the task of the middle classes.  Whereas the breaking down of such ideals is, in the present posture of society, the avowed or unavowed intention of a considerable portion of laboring men and aristocrats.  The scornful retort of the Socialist is at hand:  “Of course the middle classes are shrewd enough to practice the virtues that pay.”  Into this familiar moral bog that there are as many kinds of morality as there are economic conditions of mankind, I do not consent to plunge.  I need only say that the so-called middle class virtues would pay a workman or a lord quite as well as they do a bourgeois.  Moreover, while workmen and lords are prone to scorn the calculating virtues of the middle classes, there is no indication that the bourgeoisie has selfishly tried to keep its virtues to itself.  On the contrary there is positive rejoicing in the middle classes over a workman who deigns to keep a contract, and an aristocrat who perceives the duty of paying a debt.  In fine we of the middle classes need no more be ashamed of our highly unpicturesque virtues than we are of our inconspicuous wealth.