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

We, too, have groups of this kind everywhere, and we know what they can do for us and what they cannot do. It is easy to praise them, to flatter them, to express unbounded satisfaction with them, to speak as if they gave us all that we needed. We have done so here in England. These groups, with us, these serious and effective forces of our middle class, have been extolled as “that section of the community which has astonished the world by its energy, enterprise, and self-reliance, which is continually striking out new paths of industry and subduing the forces of nature, which has done all the great things that have been done in all departments, and which supplies the mind, the will, and the power for all the great and good things that have still to be done.” So cry the newspapers; our great orators take up the same strain. The middle-class doers of English race, with their industry and religion, are the salt of the earth. “The cities you have built,” exclaims Mr. Bright, “the railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile navy the world has ever seen!” There we have their industry. Then