It is under the influence of this motive, too, that many men, in
the upper and middle classes, rather than marry on a modest income, and
drop out of the society of their fashionable acquaintance, form
irregular sexual connexions, which are a source of injury to themselves
and ruin to their victims.
A circumstance which has probably contributed largely, in recent times,
to aggravate the feeling of false shame is the new departure which, in
commercial communities, has been taken by class-distinctions. The old
line, which formed a sharp separation between the nobility and all other
classes, has been almost effaced, and in its place have been substituted
many shades of difference between different grades of society, together
with a broad line of demarcation between what may be called the genteel
and the ungenteel classes. It was a certain advantage of the old line
that it could not be passed, and, hence, though there might be some
jealousy felt towards the nobility as a class, there were none of the
heart-burnings which attach to an uncertain position or a futile effort
to rise. In modern society, on the other hand, there is hardly any one
whose position is so fixed, that he may not easily rise above or fall
below it, and hence there is constant room for social ambition, social
disappointment, and social jealousy. Again, the broad line of gentility,
which now corresponds most closely with the old distinction of nobility,
is determined by such a number of considerations,--birth, connexions,
means, manners, education, with the arbitrary, though almost essential,
condition of not being engaged in retail trade,--that those who are just
excluded by it are apt to feel their position somewhat unintelligible,
and, therefore, all the more galling to their pride and self-respect It
would be curious to ascertain what proportion of the minor
inconveniences and vexations of modern life is due to the perplexity, on
the one side, and the soreness, on the other, created by the
exclusiveness of class-distinctions.
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