Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

[121] elements in them will make a way for them to escape out of what they really have of this danger also, to escape in the future as well as now — the future for which some observers announce this danger as so certain and so formidable. Lord Macaulay predicted that the United States must come in time to just the same state of things which we witness in England; that the cities would fill up and the lands become occupied, and then, he said, the division between rich and poor would establish itself on the same scale as with us, and be just as embarrassing. He forgot that the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the division between rich and poor,--the distinction of classes. Not only have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, betweeen aristocracy and middle class; they have not even the distinction between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes, negroes. Outside domestic service, within the range of conditions which an American may, in fact, be called upon to traverse, he passes easily from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and from riches