The Washburn leader. [volume] (Washburn, McLean County, N.D.) 1890-1986, 1916-01-14
FETTERED BY CASTE
AMERICAN WRITER cR,r,c,zEs
SYSTEM IN BRITAIN.
High Governmental Places Reserved
for Members Of the Aristocracy-
Fitness Considered q Matter
Of Little Moment.

40 ~A ~ IA 0k~0AS AAN 6VvSA
by a monarchy, with social standards
as fixed as the social foundations, the
conventions played an enormous part;
and the conventions in England were
all against hard work. 1t vas the lei
sured class that ruled, that made up
society, that held all the positions men
naturally covet. Time and again have
l been assured by Americans, Cana
dams and Australians that what most
impressed them in that England which
has been killed by the war was the
prevalence of the caste system. They
were quite right, Sydney Brooks
writes in the North American Review.
The caste system was beyond doubt
the outstanding Feature Of the British
structure. 1t was the caste system
that made the West end of London the
governing center of the empire. 1t
was the caste system that in every
British ministry reserved an excessive
number Of places for the aristocracy,
whose title to them was based plainly
On the n~onessentials of birth, manners
and social position. Nobody pretended
that they were the best men for the
Offices they filled or that the country
received from them anything like full
value for its money. They were there
chiefly because they were born in the
purple and could not be got rid of.
Hence politics in England remained
an affair of friends, and the national
business. as the wal has shown but
too clearly, was too often entrusted to
a set of charming, wealthy and conde-
scending amateurs. But it was social
ly and industrially rather than politi-
cally that the caste system worked its
gravest harm. What was it at bottom
that made the English atmosphere be-
fore the war so difficult for an Ameri-
can to breathe in freely? 1t was, l
believe. that he felt himself in a coun-
try where the dignity of life was lower
than in his own; a country where a
man born in ordinary circumstances
expected, and was expected, to die in
ordinary circumstances; where the
scope Of his efforts was traced before
hand by the accident of position;
where he was handicapped in all cases
and crushed in most by the superin-
cumbent weight Of 'convention, 'good
form,' and the deadening artiicialities
and traditions Of an old society.
That unconquerable ,buoyance which
infects the American air like a sting
and challenge, and braces every Amer
lean with the inspiration that he has
a chance in life; that here are open
opportunities, u%nreserved possibilities,
no battering at locked doors, NO 1loun-
dering down blind alleys: that here. in
short, it is the man himself who makes
his career-is something which Eng
land before the war had so disastrous
~ lost as to be hardly capable Of real
izing it. The number Of things that an
English gentleman and still more an
English LADY, could not do without
losing social caste was SO prodigious
as to form almost a schedule of forbid
den industries. There were some
trades and professions and occupa-
lions that were respectable and 9th
ers which were not. Only an English
man knew which was which, and he
knew it by an instinct which was born
in him, which he eve examined, and
so could not define. These Fictitious
and conventional gradations exist. of
course, to some extent everywhere, but
nowhere were they so stereotyped. no.
where did they strike g deeply as ir
the ante-bellum England. There was
not a single Englishman4who had not
the social privilege of despising some
other E%nglishman, and the lower n
penetrated in the social scale the more
complex and mysterious and the more
rigidly drawn did these lines Of de-
marcation become.