The English middle classes had and have no frontiers: they were and are the recruiting ground of talent, the natural social ladder of all who have capacity for leadership in the wider meaning of the word. 22) Professor Bum has compared the social and economic structure of Britain to an escalator, or moving staircase: some are higher than others, but all are moving slowly up and there is room on the left for the agile to improve their relative as well as their absolute position. The class structure knits society with order and cohesion, providing a graduated slope down which the standards of the highest may descend to the lowest and providing the spur of ambition to urge the best from below into positions of responsibility and influence.
While it has always been possible to rise into the middle classes, it has also been possible to rise out of them; and the moment a man rose into them, influences were at work to civilize and change the recruit and fit him and his descendants to new purposes — for service to the community as a whole. 23) A man who wanted social recognition was almost obliged to "do good" with some part of his money, even though he did it hypocritically and with his tongue in his cheek. His children may have done it because it was the thing to do, and yet the more thoughtful of them may have realized that, done or not, it was the right thing, necessary to the character of a gentleman and a Christian. On the continent the bourgeoisie was an isolated part of the nation, but the English middle classes learned to do more than keep their riches and maintain and extend trade and industry: they learned to be wholly national. A feature of English history has been the constant reintegration of groups split off from the main current of national experience — the burgesses, the Puritans, the Nonconformists, the Roman Catholics. Half a century’s estrangement between the farmers and the townsmen may yet be healed.
24) The English middle classes are what they are by virtue not of trade but of organization; not of property but of independence; not of power but of government; not solely because they wanted to have but because of what they wanted to be. All that is worst in the reproachful use of the word "middle class" has been present. But something else has also been present, steadily warring against philistinism though with varying success. 25) "What shall we do to be received" the new middle classes have cried, and in every generation the reply has come — from above and below — "Learn to behave like gentlemen."