As We Are and As We May Be | Page 3

which threatens to increase with
accelerated rapidity--is the depression of agriculture. I think we hardly
realize the magnitude of this great national disaster. We believe that it
is only the landlords, or the landlords and farmers, who are suffering. If
that were all--but can one member of the body politic suffer and the rest
go free from pain? All the trade of the small towns droops with
agriculture; the professional men of the country towns lose their
practice; clergymen who depend upon glebe, dissenting ministers who
depend upon the townspeople, lose their income; the labourers, the
craftsmen--why, it bewilders one even to think of the widespread ruin
which will follow the agricultural depression if it continues. And every
day carriage becomes cheaper, and food products of all kinds are
conveyed at lower prices and from greater distances. Every fall in price
makes it more difficult to let the farms, drives the rustics in greater
numbers from the country to the town, lays the curse of labour upon
thousands of untrained gentlewomen, and makes it more difficult for
them to escape in the old way, that of marriage.
Another reason is the enormous increase during the last thirty years of
the cultivated classes. We have all, except the very lowest, moved
upwards. The working-man wears broadcloth and has his club; the
tradesman who has grown rich also has his club, his daughters are
young ladies of culture, his sons are educated at the public schools and
the universities--things perfectly proper and laudable. The thickness of
the cultured stratum grows greater every day. But those who belong to
the lower part of that stratum--those whose position is not as yet
strengthened by family connections and the accumulations of

generations--are apt to yield and to be crushed down by the first
approach of misfortune. Then the daughters who, in the last generation,
would have joined the working girls and become dressmakers in a
'genteel' way, join the ranks of distressed gentlewomen.
Everybody knows the way up the social ladder. It has been shown to
those below by millions of twinkling feet. It is a broad ladder up which
people are always climbing, some slowly, some quickly--from
corduroy to broadcloth; from workshop to counter; from shop-boy to
master; from shop to office; from trade to profession; from the
bedroom over the shop to the great country villa. The other day a
bricklayer told me that his grandfather and the first Lord O.'s father
were old pals: they used to go poaching together; but the parent of Lord
O. was so clever as to open a shop, where he sold what his friend
poached. The shop began it you see. The way up is known to
everybody. But there is another way which we seldom regard; it is the
way down again. The Family Rise is the commonest phenomenon. Is
not the name Legion of those of whom men say, partly with the pride
of connecting themselves with greatness, partly with the natural desire,
which small men always show, to tear away something of that
greatness, 'Why, I knew him when his father had a shop!' The Family
Fall is less conspicuous. Yet there are always as many going down as
climbing up. You cannot, in fact, stay still. You must either climb or
slip down--unless, indeed, you have got your leg over the topmost rung,
which means the stability of an hereditary title and landed property. We
all ought to have hereditary titles and landed property, in order to
insure national prosperity for ever. Novelists do not, as a rule, treat of
the Sinking Back because it is a depressing subject. There are many
ways of falling. Mostly, the father makes an ass of himself in the way
of business or speculation; or he dies too soon; or his sons possess none
of their father's ability; or they take to drink. Anyhow, down goes the
Family, at first slowly, but with ever increasing rapidity, back to its
original level. There is no country in the world--certainly not the
United States--where a young man may rise to distinction with greater
ease than this realm of the Three Kingdoms. There is also none where
the families show a greater alacrity in sinking. But the most reluctant to
go down, those who cling most tightly to the social level which they

think they have reached, are the daughters; so that when misfortunes
fall upon them they are ready to deny themselves everything rather than
lose the social dignity which they think belongs to them.
Again, a steady feeder of these ranks is the large family of girls. It is
astonishing what a number of families there are in which they are all, or
nearly all, girls. The father is, perhaps, a professional man of some kind,
whose blamelessness has