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

“ [84] land up to a high standard when war comes, or rebellion.” But this is just what the middle-class virtue of our race is abundantly capable of doing; as Puritan England in the seventeenth century, and the inheritors of the traditions of Puritan England since, have signally shown. “It is they who maintain the national credit, it is they who steadily improve the standard of national education.” By national education our informant means popular education; and here, too, we are still entirely within the pale of middle-class achievement. Both in England and in America, the middle class is abundantly capable of maintaining the national credit, and does maintain it. It is abundantly capable of recognizing the duty of sending to school the children of the people; nay, of sending them also, if possible, to a Sunday school, and to chapel or church. True; and yet, in England at any rate, the middle class, with all its industry and with all its religiousness,--the middle class well typified, as I long ago pointed out, by a certain Mr. Smith, a secretary to an insurance company, who “labored under the apprehension that he would come to poverty and that he was eternally lost,” --the English middle class presents us at this day, for our actual needs, and for the purposes of national civilization, with a defective