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was on an archaic system of education and profoundly retrospective and
legal in all its habits of thought. It was known that the accumulation
of men in cities involved unprecedented dangers of pestilence; there was
an energetic development of sanitation; but that the diseases of
gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and
produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century
thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically
unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming
unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century accomplished itself.
The new society was divided into three main classes. At the summit
slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than
design, potent save for the will and aim, the last avatar of Hamlet in
the world. Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the
gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the
dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foremen,
managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the
minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury
and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers.
Already the love story and the marrying of two persons of this middle
class have been told: how they overcame the obstacles between them, and
how they tried the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside
and came back speedily enough into the city of London. Denton had no
means, so Elizabeth borrowed money on the securities that her father
Mwres held in trust for her until she was one-and-twenty.
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