"Upper class" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... class is poor because the little upper class takes away from 'em and eats up all they toil and slave to make. Oh, it ain't the upper class's fault. They do it because they're ignorant more'n because they're bad, just as what goes on down here is ignorance more'n ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... industries, and so forth: 'Cittadini,' or the middle class, born in the state, and of more importance than the plebeians; 'Gentiluomini,' or masters of Venice by sea and land, about 3,000 in number, corresponding to the burghers of Florence. What he says about the Constitution refers solely to this upper class. The elaborate work of M. Yriarte, La Vie d'un Patricien de Venise an Seizieme Siecle, Paris, 1874, contains a complete analysis of the Venetian state-machine. See in particular what he says about the helplessness of the Doges, ch. xiii. 'Rex in foro, senator in curia, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Zedekiah. The city was taken, the king's sons were killed in his presence, his own eyes were put out; and, after the temple and palace had been burned and the city sacked, he, with all the families of the upper class who had not escaped to the desert, was carried away to Babylon (586 B.C.). Tyre (the old city) in like manner was taken ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... presence of all plebes the yearlings and other upper class men keep themselves loftily apart, except when compelled to drill the plebes or perform other military or other official duties ...
— Dick Prescott's First Year at West Point • H. Irving Hancock
... stubbornly. "Sometimes what you don't know does hurt you. If I could live again, I would be a better man. When I was a boy there was no learning to be had, except for the upper class and the priests. Now when I am old and it is too late, you can learn everything. I have loitered around the schools and listened to the boys talking their lessons over. It is amazing what they know. Why, they know everything! ...
— The Boy Scouts in Front of Warsaw • Colonel George Durston
... a sprinkling of thrill-seekers from other walks of life far removed from the prize-ring. Jimmy often noticed women among the spectators—well-dressed women, with every appearance of refinement, and there were always men of the same upper class ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... enable him to provide for his old age. It is simply a question of the adjustment of values. This experiment has been tried before by different countries, but it was always tried in the interest of the employers; the laborers had no voice in the matter; and it was the interest of the upper class to cheapen labor; and hence Muscle became a drug and Cunning invaluable and masterful; and the process was continued indefinitely until the catastrophe came. Now labor has its own branch of our Congress, and can defend its rights and explain ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history from the days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language went underground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle of Anglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo- Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French. Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... the general course of European affairs during the Napoleonic period, was anything determined by the sentiment of the Italian people. The peasantry at times fought against the French with energy; but no strong impulse, like that of the Spaniards, enlisted the upper class of Italians either on the side of Napoleon or on that of his enemies. Acquiescence and submission had become the habit of the race; the sense of national unity and worth, the personal pride which makes the absence of liberty an intolerable ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... as they're begun, things soon will come about, And ve shall be the upper class, and turn the others out; Their laws ve'll execute ourselves, and raise their hevelation, That's tit for tat, for they'd make that the ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... and soul to the control of matter. Her children are not drudges and slaves. The Constitution has declared it, and the spirit of our institutions has confirmed it. The best the land can teach them they shall know. They shall learn that there is no upper class in their country, and no lower, and they shall understand how it is that God and His world are ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... men were called out for exhibition. Youngsters of the first line they were and even in their privates' uniform they bore the unmistakable signs of belonging to the Russian upper class. Each saluted and made his bow, as if he had come on to do a turn before the footlights. It was not the first time they had been paraded before visitors. In the prince's eye I noted a twinkle, which as much as said: "Well, why not? ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... finished, for the cultivation of special aptitudes. "Our great Universities," he said, "Oxford and Cambridge, do next to nothing towards this end. They are, as Signor Mateucci called them, hauts lycees; and, though invaluable in their way as places where the youth of the upper class prolong to a very great age, and under some very valuable influences, their school-education, yet, with their college and tutor system, nay, with their examination and degree system, they are still, in fact, schools, and ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... confirmed. It was argued for the Crown that 10,000 acres of land had been quietly absorbed by the Family while there was no king in England: but there happened in this case what happened in every other since the upper class, the natural leaders of the people, had curbed the tyranny of the King—Charles capitulated. Then followed (of course) popular rising; it was quelled. Before their long struggle for freedom against the ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... psychological life. We must know more of the meaning of progress. The domination of society by one economic class has for its chief evil the thwarting of the instinct life of the subordinate class and the perversion of the upper class. The extent and characteristics of this evil are to be estimated only when we know the innate potentialities and inherited propensities of man; and the ordering of this knowledge and its application to the changeable economic structure is ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... easy grace and dignified manners they gradually acquired and retain, to a great extent, to the present day. The other caste—the Illiterates—were dependents of the Intellectuals. Without mental training, with few wants, and little expenses, they were as contented, in their sphere, as the upper class were in theirs. Like their masters, they had their hopes, but they never knew what misery was, as one understands it in Europe, and in this felicitous, ambitionless condition, they never urgently demanded education, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... caged birds hung in their cages about the colonnade around the court, and Bell found Paula being introduced to a pale young man in the stiff collar and unspeakably formal morning clothes of the South American who is of the upper class. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... to taste it. This liquor is brewed from a mixture of rice and millet, and from its quickly turning sour seems to have little strength, and to have undergone a very imperfect degree of fermentation. Their hot wine is seldom used except by the upper class of people who, not satisfied with the strong empyreumatic flavour communicated in the distillation, drink it boiling hot in the midst ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... the times is known to all. The nation, as was shown in 1745, when a handful of Highlanders penetrated without opposition to the heart of the kingdom, has grown slack and cowardly. Gambling penetrates every nook and cranny of the upper class; the officers of the army devote themselves to fashion; the navy's main desire is for prize money. Even the domestic affections are at a low ebb; and the grand tour brings back a new species of Italianate Englishman. The poor, indeed, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... both beauty and wit, but of little education; the poor as hardy, industrious, and intelligent—all full of pleasant humour and vivacity, with a striking resemblance, says Napier, to his countrymen, the Irish. The upper class was mainly Italian in origin, and willingly threw all the responsibility for affairs on the British government. The official class, more numerous in proportion to population than in any country in Europe, scrambled for the petty salaries of paltry posts ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... nobility of new men. But even the older families already had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figured both as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upper class can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy, which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitled to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as very high praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... the government college. Bareilly is the headquarters of a brigade in the 7th division of the eastern army corps. The chief manufactures are furniture and upholstery. Bareilly college is a seat of upper class learning for the surrounding districts. It is conducted by an English staff, and its course includes the subjects for degrees in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... class, who had practically been supreme in the state, had been oppressive money-lenders, and had controlled the decisions of the law courts. It was not in vain that the people now demanded that as the two consuls were practically elected to further the interests of the upper class, so they, the plebeians, should have the election of two tribunes to protect them from wrong and oppression. These new officers were duly appointed, and eventually their number was increased to ten. Their power was almost absolute, but it never seems to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... was a student at the Petrograd University at that time. Left wing inclined, in fact. I think he belonged to Kerensky's Social Democrats. At any rate, in spite of his upper class background he made out all right for a time. In fact he became an instructor and our early life wasn't particularly bad." Paul cleared his throat. "Until the purges in the 1930s. It was decided that my father was a Bukharinist Right Deviationist, ...
— Revolution • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... beginning of this inquiry it was emphasised that its theme would in the main be the religious views of the upper class, and within this sphere again especially the views of those circles which were in close touch with philosophy. The reason for this is of course in the first place that only in such circles can we expect to find expressed ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... history down to the second half of the seventeenth century, the canons and customs were dictated solely by the upper class, and neither merchants nor artisans were recognized as possessing any social or literary influence whatever. But in the middle period of the Tokugawa Bakufu—the Genroku period, as it is commonly called—the tradesman became a comparatively conspicuous figure. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... description of people are the upper class?" said the man in black, putting a lump of sugar into his gin ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... worked out in virtually forced labour, but by extortionate tithes paid to the alien Anglican Church, in addition to the scanty dues willingly contributed to the hunted priests of his own prescribed religion. His resident upper class—though we must allow for many honourable exceptions—was the Squirearchy, satirized by Arthur Young as petty despots with the vices of despots; idle, tyrannical, profligate, boorish, fit founders of the worst social system the modern civilized world has ever ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you know nothing ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... because it was inefficient, and work that was necessarily inefficient because it was underpaid. In the lower class there were no reserves; the dependants lived from hand to mouth, and when hand failed to find food, they had to come to the upper class, first for remission of its claims on them and then for actual subsistence. But the dependence was mutual, and there were no reserves at top equal to the needs of that joint hazard. Penury was only at two removes from the ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... and the fairies are to the Irish poor, what the large devil with a black face was to the Scotch poor—the poetry of life. In the same way in England we have an aristocracy instead of a Government. We rely on a certain good humour and education in the upper class to interpret to us our contradictory Constitution. No educated man born of woman will be quite so absurd as the system that he has to administer. In short, we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws. And last of all we in England have an aristocracy ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... Nine-tenths of the populace were no better than slaves, in much the same condition as the Russian serfs before the late emancipation took place. They were acknowledged retainers, owing their service to, and holding their farms at the option of the upper class; namely, the so-called nobility of the country. This overmastering class prided itself on the fact of neither promoting nor being engaged in any kind of business; indeed, this uselessness was one condition attached to its patent of nobility. These autocratic rulers knew no other interest ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... courses in military science, while the Medical School, with almost the whole Faculty enlisted, foreseeing the need of surgeons turned its whole force to training the upper classmen, and the Law School so arranged its programme that twelve hours a week were given over to drill. The upper class medical, engineering, and dental students were also enlisted as ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... doctrines in Ireland is this, that whereas in England it is the upper class principally that is militarist, in Ireland it is principally the lower class, and whereas it is the Castle authorities who are always preaching the iniquity of physical force, it is the lower classes ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... the surface of society, London wears its most radiant smile; when shops are gayest, and trade most brisk; when down the thoroughfares roll and glitter the countless streams of indolent and voluptuous life; when the upper class spend, and the middle class make; when the ball-room is the Market of Beauty, and the club-house the School for Scandal; when the hells yawn for their prey, and opera-singers and fiddlers—creatures hatched from gold, as the dung-flies ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... formed a considerable portion of the population. The class next above them comprised the large body of free men, who were possessed of a certain amount of property but were poor and humble, as their name, muslikenu, implied. These we may refer to as the middle class. The highest, or upper class, in the Babylonian community embraced all the officers and ministers attached to the court, the higher officials and servants of the state, and the owners of considerable lands and estates. The differences which divided and marked off ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... alone, the boys luxuriated in the bath; and then, having put on fresh suits, they felt clean and comfortable once again. The clothes were those used by the upper class of slaves, employed as overseers. Don Sagasta had determined to get them some clothes of a superior class; but he felt that it was better that, so long as they were in hiding, they should be dressed in a costume which would, ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... evidently held to the idea so thoroughly carried out in Russia: namely, that the upper class, which is to conduct the business of the state, should be highly educated, but that the mass of the people need no education beyond what will keep them contented in the humble station to which it has pleased God to call them. ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... that I compared favourably enough with my mates. Dress played little part in every day college life, and for such occasions as socials or Friday night debating society I soon learned from upper class girls to mitigate ugly gowns with pretty ribbons. And I congratulated myself upon the fact that I was not by any means the plainest girl in my class. My face was hopeless, but my hard-won fight for an erect posture had given me a bearing that seemed almost distinguished. And—well, ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... their husbands, brothers, or fathers, only for having been seen by men, and even to the present day a husband would be considered quite justified in the eye of the law if he were to kill his wife for the great sin of having spoken to another man but himself! A widow of the upper class is not allowed to re-marry, and if she claims any pretence of having loved her late husband, she ought to try to follow him to the other world at the earliest convenience by committing the jamun, a ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... the presence wuz not to blame for the result in his Deestrick. He tried to earn his bread; but wat cood he do? The Ablishnists knowd he wuz bought with a price, and laffed at him. The Democrisy, sich ez voted, we'd hev got anyhow. Them ez didn't vote, nor do nothin, wuz the upper class, wich expected the offises themselves, and ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby
... disposing the heads of the Irish clergy to receive him as the emancipator of the Church from the secular oppression and imposts of the chiefs. But in the case of England, a settled and agricultural country, the conquest was complete and final; the conquerors formed everywhere a new upper class which, though at first alien and oppressive, became in time a national nobility, and ultimately blended with the subject race. In the case of Ireland, though the Septs were easily defeated by the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... the upper class who had incited the people to resistance, Neithotep, the high-priest of Neith, had taken the foremost place. He was therefore sent to Memphis and put in close confinement, with one hundred of his unhappy confederates. The larger number ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... so far. In a great city like London now (great in generations—centuries—as well as in numbers) you'd just accept the bare fact and go about your business. Not a ghost of a show, don't you see? Here you've just missed it, and, the middle class always flowing into the upper class, you feel that you should get your chance any minute. Ought to have had it long ago....I can't imagine, for instance, that if my mother had married the son of my grandfather's partner that I should have wasted much time wondering why I wasn't asked to the Elizabethan Hail on the hill. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... breeding, well mannered and yet appallingly outspoken and indifferent to the opinion of her interlocutory, amiable and yet peremptory, arbitrary, and high-tempered to the last bearable degree, and withal a very typical managing matron of the upper class, treated as a naughty child until she grew into a scolding mother, and finally settling down with plenty of practical ability and worldly experience, limited in the oddest way with domestic and class limitations, conceiving the universe exactly ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... happens it that in Paris and London, centres of social wealth, poverty is as hideous as in the days of Caesar and Agricola? Why, by the side of this refined aristocracy, has the mass remained so uncultivated? It is laid to the vices of the people: but the vices of the upper class appear to be no less; perhaps they are even greater. The original stain affected all alike: how happens it, once more, that the baptism of civilization has not been equally efficacious for all? Does this not show that progress itself is ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... time in doubt. Yet as the accredited painter of the Faubourg Saint-Germain he contributed an essential element to the development of realistic fiction. No one has rendered so well as he the high-strung, neuropathic women of the upper class, who neither understand themselves nor are wholly comprehensible to others. In 'Monsieur de Camors', crowned by the Academy, he has yielded to the demands of a stricter realism. Especially after the fall of the Empire had removed a powerful motive for gilding the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... own things, so hard to make sure that one is right in feeling it! We have a great empire. But so had Nebuchadnezzar. We extol the "unrivalled happiness" of our national civilization. But then comes a candid friend,[349] and remarks that our upper class is materialized, our middle class vulgarized, and our lower class brutalized. We are proud of our painting, our music. But we find that in the judgment of other people our painting is questionable, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... to which he had been subjected? First he had been treated as a dog, and then, far worse, far, far worse and more difficult to bear with dignity, as a child. A beefsteak? Oh, the shame that seared his soul as he thought of it! This revolting specimen of the upper class had declared, with a hateful smile of indulgent superiority, that all his love, all his sufferings, all his just indignation, depended solely for their existence on whether he did or did not eat a beefsteak. Could coarse-mindedness and gross insensibility ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... time we are able to divide them into five classes: the upper class of white Puerto Ricans; the lower class of whites, or peasants; the negroes; the mixed people of negro and Indian or ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... arrangements for Margaret's education. This was more difficult than for that of the boys. She could not trust her sweet, gentle, blue-eyed maid among girls who might be rough or unmannerly, and yet she could not possibly afford to send her to one of the upper class of schools. Margaret already read much better than she did, for her own attainments extended no further than a limited amount of reading and writing. The few books, besides the Bible, she had brought away from the minister's library, were mostly on theological ...
— Janet McLaren - The Faithful Nurse • W.H.G. Kingston
... upon his weight, and no doubt upon his general stamina, most conspicuously. These figures, it must be borne in mind, deal with the living members of each class at the ages given. The mortality, however, in the black or lower class is probably far higher than in the upper class year by year, and if this could be allowed for it would greatly increase the apparent failure of the lower class. And these matters of height and weight are only coarse material deficiencies. They serve to suggest, but they do not serve to gauge, the ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... immigrants accepting Protestantism as "gentlemanly" or "progressive" (some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the Rex in Spain and the Rex in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the "court" and "upper class" way of thinking. They were "Arians" and proud of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts was small, but their ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... manufacturers of a practical type, who have from time to time founded and endowed technical schools, designed for workingmen's sons. The early schools of this type inevitably reflected the ideal of the self-made man. They succeeded in transferring a few skilled workers into the upper class of trained engineers, and a few less skilled workers into the class of trained mechanics, but did not aim to educate the many who are doomed to the unskilled work which the permanent specialization of the division of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... city and, under the inspiration of English novels and the tutelage of a woman friend who visited in New York and often went abroad, was developing ideas of family and class and rank. She talked feelingly of the "lower classes" and of the duty of the "upper class" toward them. Her "goings-on" created an acid prejudice against higher education in her father's mind. As she was unfolding to him a plan for sending Hampden to Harvard he interrupted with, "No MORE idiots in my family at my expense," and started out to feed ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... of Market and Front Streets was brisk with life and activity at twelve, the change hour, every day. Here assembled the merchants of the city, members of the upper class who cared enough about the rest of the world to make an inquiry into its progress; men of leisure about town whose vocation in life was to do nothing and who had the entire day in which to do it. All conditions, all varieties of character ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... Vende, but the greater part of the contingent fell into line, so great was the habit of obedience. This meekness on the part of the populace enticed the government into practices even more illegal and more dangerous withal, in that they struck at the upper class; for after forcibly enlisting men who had been exempted by lot, the same measure was applied to those who had quite legally paid for a replacement, and they were forced into the army, although some families had been financially strained and even ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... children moved to an upper class, Mr. Bird was laid away, but the children requested his presence. So he entered the new room and became a farmer. He had now to write letters, to arrange rents, etc., and the money had to be made and counted. ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... side. This gentleman was lording it in true caricature fashion, with a Lord Dundreary drawl and a general execration of everything; while I sat in the chimney corner, speculating on the reason why many of the upper class of my countrymen—"High Toners," as they are called out here—make themselves so ludicrously absurd. They neither know how to hold their tongues or to carry their personal pretensions. An American is nationally assumptive, an Englishman personally ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... a most thorough believer in class and class distinction and said that he hoped to see the day when the world would be ruled by an upper class who would see that the lower classes had all that was good for them, but would not be allowed to turn the world upside down with their clumsy illogical reforms and new religions, Saint-Simonianism, humanitarianism, or as a matter of fact with any of the old established isms. ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... said Mrs. Margaretta Grey, "that with an increase of wealth unequally distributed, and a pressure of population, there has sprung up amongst us a spurious refinement, that cramps the energy and circumscribes the usefulness of women in the upper class of society. A lady, to be such, must be a lady, and nothing else.... Ladies dismissed from the dairy, the confectionery, the store-room, the still-room, the poultry-yard, the kitchen-garden, and the orchard" [she might have added, the spinning-wheel], "have hardly yet found ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... all appears to me to be that the increase of wealth in the upper class is exterminating the home idea, to which I cling, single woman as I am; and consequently the middle classes, as blind copyists, also are tending to throw ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military manoeuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the "prima," or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however, it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as a comical incongruity rather ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... day when the Watteville family inaugurated the Belvedere, Savaron also was founding a monument. Thanks to the connections he had obscurely formed among the upper class of merchants in Besancon, he was starting a fortnightly paper, called the Eastern Review, with the help of forty shares of five hundred francs each, taken up by his first ten clients, on whom he had impressed the necessity for promoting the interests of ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... is not general, when men are dominated by the zest for action, and when cities have become sufficiently large to keep the theaters well filled. It is also the natural form in such a period as that of the Restoration, when literary life centers about a frivolous upper class who demand an easy and social form of entertainment. But the condition is very different when, as in the eighteenth and still more in the nineteenth century, the habit of reading, and some recognition of its educating influence, had spread throughout almost ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... to dine with the Hares that evening. They lived in a large house on a fashionable 'road' as certain, of the streets were called. It was a typical upper class, English home. There were many fine old things in it but no bright colors, nothing to dazzle or astonish; you like the wooden Indian in war-paint and feathers and the stuffed bear and high colored rugs in the parlor ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... understood that the people will be supreme there when democratic principles have crept into the laws and manners—when ranks are intermixed—when minds, as well as fortunes, are brought more nearly together—and when the upper class has lost, with its hereditary wealth, its power, its precedents, and its leisure. The tastes and propensities natural to democratic nations, in respect to literature, will therefore first be discernible in the drama, and ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Did all men flee his presence till he found Life too intolerable? Nay; not so! Death came too close upon the heels of crime, He had but done what all his tribe deemed just: All the great mass—I mean the upper class— The Rabbis, all the Pharisees and Priests Ay, and the lower mob as well who cried, "Give us Barabbas! Christus to the cross!" These men were all of them on Judas's side, And Judas had done naught against the law. Were he this villain, he had but to say, "I followed Christus till I found at last ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... the upper class of thieves, which is the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the aristocracy of the tribe, had, in 1816, after the peace which made life hard for so many men, formed an association called les grands fanandels—the Great Pals—consisting of the most noted master-thieves and ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... language spoken by the bulk of the population. He maintained that the West-European civilisation, that had been imparted to the Finnish nation, would never take firm root if only supported by a small upper class—it ought to become the property of the whole people. An educated, Finnish-speaking class must be created, and to this end schools established in which the pupils could receive their instruction in Finnish. The Finnish language must be introduced in government offices, courts ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... of the embryo stand to each other. For, from its first appearance, the warrior-class, headed by chiefs, is that by which the external acts of the society are carried on: alike in war, in negotiation, and in migration. Afterwards, while this upper class grows distinct from the lower, and at the same time becomes more and more exclusively regulative and defensive in its functions, alike in the persons of kings and subordinate rulers, priests, and soldiers; the inferior class becomes more and more exclusively occupied in providing ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... mighty coarse breed. I've lived out with gentle folks over the water, and they were none of your sort. But, go on John Burrill, the low women you are so fond of, and the girls at the factory, have called you good lookin', until your head is turned with vanity. You have got yourself in among the upper class, no matter how, and I suppose you expect your good looks to do the rest for you. I mind once when I was at service in Herefordshire, the Squire had a fine young beast in his cattle yard, black an' sleek, an' handsome to look at, and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... say, with admiration, that a woman can go past the cuartels or the fire stations, without encountering insult in the form of galanteria; and the electric street-car line, suspected at first, has gained the confidence of nearly all. Many Filipino families of the upper class permit their daughters to go to and from the American schools on the trolley car, and it is no uncommon thing to see three or four youngsters, all under ten, climbing on and off with their books, asking for transfers, and enjoying their liberty, who ten years ago ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... world led by a dominant aspiration of some sort; and Josephine, in her heart, loved power and admired those who possessed it. Political power especially had that charm for her which it has for most English people of the upper class. There is some quality in the English race which breeds an inordinate admiration for all kinds of superiority: it is certain that if one class of English society can be justly accused of an over-great veneration for rank, the class which is rank ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... exercise the different handicrafts; the town supports two goldsmiths, who are mulattoes, and have each several apprentices; the blacksmiths are chiefly Indians, as is the case generally throughout the province. The manners of the upper class (copied from those of Para) are very stiff and formal, and the absence of the hearty hospitality met with in other places, produces a disagreeable impression at first. Much ceremony is observed in the intercourse of the principal people with each ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... originally one of an upper class of citizens ranking second in point of wealth and ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... out by this infiltration of the noblesse and clergy into the {51} Third Estate, was clear: the deputies to the States-General, whichever order they belonged to, were nearly all members of the educated middle and upper class of France. Part of the deputies of the noblesse stood for class privilege, and so did a somewhat larger part of those of the clergy. But a great number in both these orders were of the same sentiment as the deputies of the Third Estate. ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... whites, and twenty-four were arrested and thrown into prison. Elated with her success, she began to ascend in the social scale, and criminated some persons of the highest social standing in the city, whose characters were above suspicion. This was turning the tables on them in a manner the upper class did not expect, and they began to reflect what the end might be. The testimony that was sufficient to condemn the slaves was equally conclusive against them. The stake and the gallows which the court had erected for the black man, it could ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... must gild their spurs, but they need not win them. The equal division of property keeps the younger sons of rich people above the necessity of military service. Thus the army loses an element of refinement, and the moneyed upper class forgets what it is to count heroism among its virtues. Still I don't believe in any aristocracy without pluck as its backbone. Ours may show it when the time comes, if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... readers are to imagine seated on the deck—on one of the many decks (all connected by elevators)—of the Gloritania, one word may be said. Vere de Lancy is (as the reviewers have under oath declared) a typical young Englishman of the upper class. He is nephew to the Duke of—, but of this fact no one on the ship, except the captain, the purser, the steward, and the ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... satisfactory; they were quite respectable, bourgeois, silk merchants in a small way—although at least two strata below that haute bourgeoisie which now regarded itself as the real upper class of the Republique Francaise. A true Ruyler, however, would have fled at the first danger signal, never have reached the point where inquiries were ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... worse nourished than men and boys. There was a time when the fashion prevailed for woman to eat as little as possible; she was to have as "etherial" an appearance as possible; the conception of beauty in our upper class, even to-day, is to the effect that it is "vulgar" if a young girl or young woman have a blooming complexion, red cheeks and a vigorous frame. It is also known, that with numberless women, under otherwise equal social conditions with men, the food is greatly inferior. Out of ignorance ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... Russians, who fell back before him. Meanwhile he wrote to the emperor, on December 1st: "Levies of men are very easily made, but there is a want of persons who can direct their instruction and organization. There is also a want of guns. The feeling of Warsaw is excellent, but the upper class are making use of their influence to calm the ardor which is prevalent in the middle classes. The uncertainty of the future terrifies them, and they leave it to be sufficiently understood that they will only openly declare themselves when, with ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... deliverance of his country was the first step in a career which our age glories in pursuing, and instituted a power which has done more than anything, except revealed religion, for the regeneration of society. The upper class had possessed the right of making and administering the laws, and he left them in possession, only transferring to wealth what had been the privilege of birth. To the rich, who alone had the means of sustaining ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... think if he isn't a man in society, he is, at least, a man belonging to the upper class. But that, again, is ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... comfortably filled. Of course we had an Irish programme which was just the right key note and the people gave us a hearty reception and many recalls. After the concert, friends came in carriages and took us to the St. Patrick's ball given by the upper class of Irish citizens. It was my first experience at an Irish ball. I did not retire until two o'clock in the morning, pretty well convinced that the Gaelic dancers are people to enjoy their fun to the utmost. March 18th. At the matinee this afternoon ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... years of age, wearing the working livery of servants of the upper class,—the long striped waistcoat with sleeves, and the white linen apron,—was ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... Eighteenth Century, 2 vols., 1891, and by Mr. ASHTON, whose Old Times, 1885, is almost wholly composed of newspaper cuttings and caricatures, and is, therefore, so far as it goes, a contemporary authority. Notices of the gambling and frivolity of a portion of the upper class, some not before printed, are given in Sir G. TREVELYAN'S Early Life of C. J. Fox (see above). An independent study should include the chronicle in the Annual Register, Walpole's Letters, JESSE, George Selwyn and his Contemporaries, 4 vols., 1843, and Selwyn's Letters, edited by ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... what his audiences were. He wrote for the people, and the theatre in his day was a popular amusement for the multitude, probably more than it was a recreation for those who enjoyed the culture of letters. A taste for letters was prevalent among the upper class, and indeed was fashionable among both ladies and gentlemen of rank. In this the court of Elizabeth set the fashion. The daughter of the duchess was taught not only to distill strong waters, but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pacific Russia—the heart and soul of her, claiming this to be the true ethical and spiritual ideal for her people, and censoring her upper class, with its foreign culture, materialism, and infidelity, as being the only real traitor to this saving morality of the ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... the bad in democracy predominates over the good, or the good over the bad, a question which I shall not attempt to decide, the popular balderdash about it corresponds to no real conviction. The upper class has never believed in it; the middle class has the strongest reasons to hate and fear it. But how about the lower class, in whose interests the whole machine is supposed to have been set going? The ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... our plan here at Overton," laughed Grace. "When I was a lonely, bewildered freshman, several of the upper class girls made it their business to look out for my comfort. Now it is my turn to pass ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... Moritz which remain with me have something of the quality, for me, of the illustrations in a French novel. I like to consult them; they are so crisp and daintily defined and isolated and individual. Yet I can only write about an upper class German mamma eating brodchen and honey with three fair square daughters, young, younger, youngest, and not a flaxen hair mislaid among them, and the intelligent accuracy with which they looked out of the window and said that it was ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... The upper class of society in the island is rather exclusive, but it is difficult to say what qualification entitles a man to be received into "society." The entree at Government House is not sufficient; but a uniform is powerful, and wealth is omnipotent. ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... Trubnaia Plastchad has a great reputation in Moscow for its cuisine, and is the favourite restaurant and resort of the upper class; it has an imposing general luncheon and dining-hall, also separate saloons for private dinner-parties. Most of the ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... fresh fractures are likely to be caused in undoing a portion, a process often very necessary; professional repairers will tell you "it tears the wood too much." The glues mostly in favour among upper class repairers are those known as Russian, Cologne and Isinglass, all good; they are light in colour, very firm, not too brittle, and transparent. There are other varieties to be had of excellent quality and which conform to the conditions ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... needs a large equipment. The man who comes forward to shape a country's policy has truly no end of things to consider. He must be aware of the condition of the people: no statesman must fall into the sincere but thoroughly upper class blunder that President Taft committed when he advised a three months' vacation. Realizing how men and women feel at all levels and at different places, he must speak their discontent and project their hopes. Through this he will get power. Standing ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... without being completely dressed, and with his hat; and whenever a Freshman either speaks to a superior or is spoken to by one, he shall keep his hat off until he is bidden to put it on. A Freshman shall not play with any members of an upper class, without being asked; nor is he permitted to use any acts of familiarity with them, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... our English upper class," said Darrell, with a sneer. "Is there anything they take lightly?—par exemple! It seems to me they carry off this amusement better than most. They may be stupid, but they are good-looking. I say, Ashe"—he turned towards the new-comer who had just ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... degree of vigour and even of social utility under certain circumstances by means of tenacious pride in its own order, a new plutocracy is demoralised from the very beginning of its existence by want of a similar kind of pride in itself, and by the ignoble necessity of craving the countenance of an upper class that loves to despise and humiliate it. Besides the more obvious evils of a position resting entirely on material opulence, and maintaining itself by coarse and glittering ostentation, there is a fatal moral hollowness which infects both serious ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... nodded the superintendent. "I am aware of the disinclination of the members of one upper class to interfere with the members of another upper class. The fact that you made a protest at all is what has convinced me that yourself and Mr. Dalzell were in the room at the time with a worthy instead of an unworthy motive. Worthy motives are ...
— Dave Darrin's Third Year at Annapolis - Leaders of the Second Class Midshipmen • H. Irving Hancock
... he grew so well and strong that when he was about eight years old he was placed with his brothers in the upper class of the Edinburgh grammar school, known as the High School. Though he had had some lessons in Latin with a private tutor, he was behind his class in this subject, and being a high-spirited and sensitive boy, he felt rather keenly this disadvantage. Perhaps ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... Low Churchmen find they can get a better sermon at the chapel, and can be hail-fellow-well-met with their pastor in these extraneous denominations. Thus the Church loses many of its former adherents, and while Anglicanism still remains the religion of the upper class, it can in no way pretend to be that of even ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny
... libraries in Oxford Street, and these thoroughfares are thronged with the lower middle-class, therefore the lower middle-class buys or hires books. In my industrial group the institutions and machinery perfected by the upper class for itself do not exist at all, and one may watch the lower without danger of being led to false conclusions by the accidental propinquity of phenomena that have really nothing ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... CHATE.—This cucumber is a native of Egypt and Arabia, and produces a fruit of almost the same substance as that of the Melon. In Egypt it is esteemed by the upper class natives, as well as by Europeans, as the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... hardness of the fanatic and the feelings of Puritan conquerors towards a conquered Catholic people. 'I have eaten with them,' said one, 'drunk with them, fought with them; but I never prayed with them.' Their descendants became, probably, the very worst upper class with which a country was ever afflicted. The habits of the Irish gentry grew beyond measure brutal and reckless, and the coarseness of their debaucheries would have disgusted the crew of Comus. Their drunkenness, their blasphemy, ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... particular good, of supreme importance, which results from Lady Ogram's activity. In the rustics' eyes, it would be merely a new device for filling up the ranks of cooks and housemaids, to the sole advantage of an upper class. Of course that view is altogether wrong, but it would be held. The paper-mill, being quite a novel enterprise, excites new thoughts. It offers the independence these people desire, and yet it exacts an obvious discipline. It establishes ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... old, I was sent to school at Reykjavik; but after pocketing the diploma of the upper class, my longing led me down to Copenhagen, where I chose the study of veterinary science. For three years I worked zealously at my studies and took all the preliminary examinations required, until suddenly ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... hate the pride of such a selfish, heartless, God-forgetting aristocracy? How can He do otherwise than deliver up the city? God has not changed, and though His mills grind slowly, they do grind still; and it is as true for England and America, as it was for Samaria, that a wealthy and leisurely upper class, which cares only for material luxury glossed over by art, which has condescended to be its servant, is bringing near the evil day which it hugs itself into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... gain them. We must possess the homage of society! And for this purpose we must be rich, or at least seem to be so. Hence the struggles after style—the efforts made to put on the appearances of wealth—the dash, the glitter, and the show of middle and upper class life;—and hence, too, the motley train of palled and vitiated tastes—of shrunken hearts and stunted intellects—of folly, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... form used by Europeans in conversation with natives of all classes, and by natives of the upper class in ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... very equivalent, in syllables as in blessedness, of "Mesopotamia"! But when for the considerable rest of the essay we try to find out what humanisation is, why we find nothing but the old negative impalpable gospel, that we must "dismaterialise our upper class, disvulgarise our middle class, disbrutalise our lower class." "Om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject!" "om-m-ject and sum-m-m-ject," in short, as that famous flash of Thomas Carlyle's genius discovered and summarised Coleridge, and with ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... "Oh, no," she replied. "You must remember that they are the raw material that makes good upper classmen. It takes a whole year to mould them into shape—that is, some of them. Now, come with me and I'll see that you meet some of the upper class girls." ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... them a neutral zone of old students chatting gayly, oblivious of the purpose of the affair. Oh, but the reception committee! Save for these indefatigable martyrs, the Freshman sexes might have gazed wistfully at each other across the lines of upper class-men until the lights dipped and never been able to bow on the Quad next day. Important-looking persons with silk badges and worried faces circulated in a grim endeavor to "mix things up." One of these wild-eyed ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... fever which, in a democracy ravaged by political equality and economic inequality, impels every one to climb higher up the social ladder. Envy consumed them at the thought of the luxury of others; they plunged into debt in order that they might imitate from afar the elegance of the upper class, and all their natural honesty and good nature was poisoned by the insanity born of ambitious pride. And here again but one child was permissible, lest they should be embarrassed, delayed, forever impeded in the attainment of the ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... whose belfry crowned The hill of Science with its vane of brass, Came the Preceptor, gazing idly round, Now at the clouds, and now at the green grass, And all absorbed in reveries profound Of fair Almira in the upper class, Who was, as in a sonnet he had said, As pure as water, and as good ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... but a confession of failure in going without. In the same way, the 'Simple Life,' when led by the rich, wears to the poverty-struck an aspect of masked meanness—a matter far less tolerable in the eyes of the pauper than the traditional splendour of extravagance in the upper class, an extravagance that feeds more than the famished stomach with the crumbs that it ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... she lived in a very small house in Chelsea, and gave of her abundance to those whom she called 'the Lord's poor.' Her charities were many and wide-spread, and on that account she was highly esteemed by numbers of people, either very poor or struggling, in that upper class which needs help so much, and gets it so little. To these people Agnes Delacour gave freely, saving many young people from utter ruin by her timely aid, and drawing down on her devoted head the blessings of their fathers and mothers, who spoke of her as one ...
— Hollyhock - A Spirit of Mischief • L. T. Meade
... as Abati of the upper class, we were taken to the gates of the barrack, where we found a long train of riding camels waiting for us. The moment that I saw these beasts I knew that they were the best in the whole land, and of very great value. Indeed, ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... note of straining after effect, of artificiality. In the midst of a life limited to fundamental needs, their literature deals with fundamentals. On the whole, it was a literature for entertainment. A more learned upper class may have concerned itself then about "problems" and "purposes," as the whole world does now, but the literature of the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... wrong. Good Lord, it's about the most interesting thing I've ever heard. I didn't know anybody could escape from that awful sort of prison-house in which our—I'm English now—in which our upper class immures itself. Yet you've done it. I take it that the thing is ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... more timid Tories professed to fear has already fallen upon us. We are ruled by ignorant people. But the most ignorant people in modern Britain are to be found in the upper class, the middle class, and especially the upper middle class. I do not say it with the smallest petulance or even distaste; these classes are often really beneficent in their breeding or their hospitality, or ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... clear that the Elizabethan audiences were rather an unruly congregation. There was much cracking of nuts and consuming of pippins in the old playhouses; ale and wine were on sale, and tobacco was freely smoked by the upper class of spectators, for it was hardly yet common to all conditions. Previous to the performance, and during its pauses, the visitors read pamphlets or copies of plays bought at the playhouse-doors, and, as they drank and smoked, played at cards. In his "Gull's ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and his friends—the radicals of the upper class. Of course I only know the way it strikes me. They talk about the changes, but I don't think they quite realise. You and I, you know, we know what it is to have lived under democratic institutions: I always thought them very comfortable, but I was used to them from the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the masses had much better let the upper ranks do the governing than meddle with it themselves, that all classes are too eager to act without thinking and ought not to attempt so much; in society, that democracy is an evil because it leaves no specially trained upper class to furnish models for refinement. But there is vastly more besides this, and his value lies much more in the mental clarification afforded by his details than in the new principles of action afforded by his generalizations. He leaves men saner, soberer, juster, with a clearer sense of perspective, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a language different from the father's, and now prefers one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... the Constitution as we have seen to establish the supremacy of the so-called upper class. To consolidate its various elements and bring the government under their control was the aim of ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... Porto Rico was a relatively simple matter. It was a single island with a fairly homogeneous population apart from the Spanish upper class. For a time after military occupation in 1898, it was administered under military rule. This was succeeded by the establishment of civil government under the "organic act" passed by Congress in 1900. The law assured to the Porto Ricans American protection but withheld American citizenship—a ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... We are all parvenus. My father was a cloth merchant—in a wholesale way, certainly—and yet you see—now this is equality, sir, the real and the right kind of equality. There is no such thing as caste now. The upper class springs from the people, and the people rise to the upper class. I could have found a count for my daughter, if I had wanted to. But it is just simply a case of evil instincts, evil passions, and these communist ideas—it is all this which is against wealth. We hear a lot of rant about poverty ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... sure of to-morrow, the edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang, almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen silence or abused them violently ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... any of you, then go ahead and be fresh—-of course, not too fresh! Mix in with the upper classmen, all of you, if you want to. Have your opinions, and don't be afraid to let 'em out—-if you can't hold in any longer. To the upper class dances this winter Dick & Co. shall have a bid—-if you'll all learn how to walk and glide across a waxed floor. Remember, when you're among the fellows, you don't have to keep in the back freshmen row—-but see to it that you don't encourage general mutiny in your class against ...
— The High School Freshmen - Dick & Co.'s First Year Pranks and Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... estimates which had been made of the increase in our wealth-producing capacity showed that, roughly speaking, the use of mechanical power had increased it more than a hundredfold during the century; yet the result had been to create a limited upper class, living in unexampled luxury, while about one-fourth of the whole population existed in a state of fluctuating penury, often sinking below the margin of poverty. Many thousands were annually drawn into this gulf of destitution, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... for the entire school. The children in the upper class had taken up the study of book-making. They even went to a bindery and saw a book bound and lettered. Then, to show what they had learned, they composed, set up ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... decided, in a spasm of inspiration, that the burglar was the better man of the two. The burglar seemed quite as kind and human as the curate was— and he was also brave and self-reliant, which the curate was not. I knew there was no virtue in the upper class, for I belong to it myself; I knew there was not so very much in the lower class, for I had lived with it a long time. Many old texts about the despised and persecuted came back to my mind, and I thought that the saints might well be hidden in the criminal class. About the time Hawkins let ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... in wisdom, a principle is at least consistent; but that the aristocratic pretensions of our upper class can never be: for our gentry is of more ancient date in a great many instances, and our nobles are, fortunately for themselves and us, a mixed race, admitting to the temporary fellowship of social companionship and the permanent alliance of matrimony, wealth, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly trained women of the upper class, these raffinees of the world, may be for those who understand them—a stimulus, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... objection to little Miss Stone," said Gertrude Wells thoughtfully. "She is a freshman. I am afraid this mark of upper class favor may ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... acquaintances married off, and enjoying and flaunting the luxury she might have had—for, they had married men, of "the right sort"—"capable husbands"—men who had been more or less attentive to her—now, these grim and terrible axioms of worldly wisdom, of upper class honor, from her grandmother sounded in her ears like the boom of surf on reefs in the ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... on a visit to Alfred, read in the Columbus papers of the different classes of people composing its citizenship. "You have the upper class, the middle class, the lower class." When Uncle Madison was asked if the people of Virginia were not designated by classes, he replied: "No sir! No sir! We only have one class of people in Virginia—the high class. All the ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... no idea of anything but virtue in the Atherly blood; he had heard that the upper class of Europeans were fond of field sports and of hunting; it was odd that his sister should inherit this propensity and not he. He regarded her more kindly for this evidence of race. "You think of getting married?" ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... cobblers, in charwomen, individuality is often pushed to the edge of insanity. But as long as the Thackerayan platform of gentility stood firm all this was, comparatively speaking, concealed. For the English, of all nations, have the most uniform upper class and the most varied democracy. In France it is the peasants who are solid to uniformity; it is the marquises who are a little mad. But in England, while good form restrains and levels the universities and the army, the poor people are the most motley and amusing ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... the greatest being that the war has made men turn to spiritual things. Only an animal could be confronted with the pageant of heroism, the glory of sacrifice, and the presence of Death, and not be moved to a contemplation of the fountain-head of these sublime mysteries. But it is the upper class which in particular has returned to the Church. Before the war, rationalist and genial skeptic, the educated Frenchman went to church because it was the thing to do, and because non-attendance would weaken an institution which the world was by no ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... about the patriotic spirit of the English middle class in the present crisis. The poor people welcome to their homes soldiers who in most cases belong to the same strata of society as themselves; and, besides, ninepence a night as billet-fee is not to be laughed at. The upper class can easily bear the momentary inconvenience of Tommy's company; the method of procedure of the very rich in regard to billeting seldom varies—a room, stripped of all its furniture, fitted with beds and pictures, usually of a religious nature, is given up for the soldiers' ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... such notice of the puff-puff!" As a matter of fact, I took no interest in the locomotive; but I had observed it sufficiently to be sure that it offered no facilities for hunting. A few months ago I might have accepted the explanation: for our family has affinity with what is vulgarly termed the upper class, and my father inherits its crude and primitive instincts; among them a passion for the chase. His appearance, as he returned to our compartment, oppressed me for the hundredth time with a sense of its superabundant and even riotous vitality. His cheeks were glowing, and his whiskers ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... or their riches. In refusing to trust the people they are ensuring their own doom. They forget that there is a power greater than theirs—that England is continually on the watch to win back again her sovereignty over Ireland. Our upper class and our middle class are too jealous of their privileges to share them with us. They will give England the opportunity she wants. Then Ireland will be brought into the old subjection, and her advance ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... dormant virtues in a race? Better feeding and better wages among the working-classes—one may mark them down perhaps as factors in this product of a heightened beauty. But for these exquisite women of the upper class, is it the pace at which they have lived, unconsciously, for these five years, that has brought out this bloom and splendour?—and will it pass ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... but the gentleman of real life is copying the gentleman of fiction. He may not be particularly good-looking, but he would rather be good-looking than anything else; he may not have ridden on a mad elephant, but he rides a pony as far as possible with an air as if he had. And, upon the whole, the upper class not only especially desire these qualities of beauty and courage, but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them. Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular literature ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid aside these inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine upper class was never brought to recognise the upstart, and from that hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of happiness, content with his acquired ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the last stronghold of a unified American upper class; the last remaining American city in which Madeira and Port and noblesse oblige are fully and widely understood, and are employed according to ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... naked, except a cloth or a pair of short trousers tucked about the waist. The finest dressed part of the population was decidedly the jet-black, with his white flowing mantle and spotted turban. The upper class of Chinese merchants are exceeding polite, and seem intelligent. I visited the establishment of Whampoa and Co. Whampoa was above the middle height, stout, and with a large, well-developed head. I was told that his profits some years amounted to forty or ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... Moore and Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted, when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... monarch's costume, though richer in material than the dress of the Persian nobles, and in some points different in color, was on the whole remarkably like that of the upper class of his subjects. It was, however, most important that his dress should possess some distinguishing feature, and that that feature should be one of very marked prominency. In an absolute monarchy the king must ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... place here; the fellows looked on me as a sort of special object of ridicule, on account of the hat and cane, walk, and so on, though I thought I'd got over that by this time. The Opera House was partly filled with college men, a large number of sophomores and a few upper class men. It was pretty generally known I was going to have a row, and that brought them as much as the show. Poor Ruff was in agony all day. He supposed I'd get into the fight, and he knew he'd get in, too, sooner or later. If he did he'd be held and not be able to do anything, and then ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... already indicated pretty clearly that the vast irregular development of irresponsible wealthy people is swallowing up and assimilating more and more the old class of administrative land-owning gentlemen in all their grades and degrees. The old upper class, as a functional member of the State, is being effaced. And I have also suggested that the old lower class, the broad necessary base of the social pyramid, the uneducated inadaptable peasants and labourers, is, with the development of ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... drunkenness, such as Rubens gave to his Bacchanalian deities, united with the blanched whiteness of premature old age. Licentiousness without shame, drunkenness without rebuke, gambling without honor, and frivolity without wit characterized, alas, a great proportion of that "upper class" who disdained the occupations and sneered at ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... and is therefore retained. Late in the afternoon, when the new portion of the Alameda is in shadow, and swept by a delicious breeze from the sea, it begins to be frequented by the people; but I noticed that very few of the upper class made their appearance. So grave and sombre are these latter, that one would fancy them descended from the conquered Moors, rather than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... fore with a bound. With the renewed interest in the coming game was also noised about the report that "Miss Dean wasn't on the team any longer," and in some unknown fashion the news that she had been "asked" to resign had also gone the round of the study hall. The upper class girls were not particularly interested either in Marjorie or her affairs. She had not lived in Sanford long enough to become well-known to them, and as a rule the juniors and seniors left the bringing up of the freshmen to their sophomore sisters. The sophomores ...
— Marjorie Dean High School Freshman • Pauline Lester
... hardly said to know what school was. He had been sent indeed to Mr Lawley's grammar school for the last half-year, and had learned a few declensions in his Latin grammar. But as Mr Lawley allowed his upper class to hear the little boys their lessons, Eric had managed to get on pretty much as he liked. Only once in the entire half-year had he said a lesson to the dreadful master himself, and of course it was a ruinous failure, involving some tremendous ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... heart and soul of the student self-government movement, for it recognizes not only the obligation placed upon its members by an institution, but also the wide influence one girl may have on others. Student government knows that upper class girls can determine the spirit of the under classes. Even looking at the matter from the lightest point of view, respectful and law-abiding ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks |
