And every day carriage becomes cheaper,
and food products of all kinds are conveyed at lower prices and from
greater distances. Every fall in price makes it more difficult to let
the farms, drives the rustics in greater numbers from the country to
the town, lays the curse of labour upon thousands of untrained
gentlewomen, and makes it more difficult for them to escape in the old
way, that of marriage.
Another reason is the enormous increase during the last thirty years
of the cultivated classes. We have all, except the very lowest, moved
upwards. The working-man wears broadcloth and has his club; the
tradesman who has grown rich also has his club, his daughters are
young ladies of culture, his sons are educated at the public schools
and the universities--things perfectly proper and laudable. The
thickness of the cultured stratum grows greater every day. But those
who belong to the lower part of that stratum--those whose position is
not as yet strengthened by family connections and the accumulations of
generations--are apt to yield and to be crushed down by the first
approach of misfortune. Then the daughters who, in the last
generation, would have joined the working girls and become dressmakers
in a 'genteel' way, join the ranks of distressed gentlewomen.
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