requisite for national greatness was Intelligence; and in intelligence
the Middle Class had shown itself signally deficient. In foreign
affairs--in its dealings with Russia and Turkey, Germany and America--it
had shown "rash engagement, intemperate threatenings, undignified
retreat, ill-timed cordiality," in short, every quality best calculated
to lower England in the esteem of the civilized world.

In domestic affairs, the life and mind of the Middle Class were thus
described by the foreign critic. "The fineness and capacity of man's
spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your Middle Class has an enjoyment in
its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money;
but beyond that? Drugged with business, your Middle Class seems to have
its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except Religion; it has a
religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive.... What other enjoyments
have they? The newspapers, a sort of eating and drinking which are not
to our taste, a literature of books almost entirely religious or
semi-religious, books utterly unreadable by an educated class anywhere,
but which your Middle Class consumes by the hundred thousand, and in
their evenings, for a great treat, a lecture on Teetotalism or
Nunneries. Can any life be imagined more hideous, more dismal, more
unenviable?... Your Middle Class man thinks it the highest pitch of
development and civilization when his letters are carried twelve times a
day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and
if railway trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour.
He thinks it is nothing that the trains only carry him from an
illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at
Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there."
And, as to political and social reform, "Such a spectacle as your Irish
Church Establishment you cannot find in France or Germany. Your Irish
Land Question you dare not face." English Schools, English vestrydom,