S7o PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
the English-speaking countries—and this even in Great Britain—firon
the direct impact even of the Second World War. The recent histor
of the middle class in the English-speaking countries thus seemed mori
likely to reveal the 'secular' trend of the Western middle class's curren
social evolution, in so far as it might be possible to identify this socia
trend by isolating it from contemporaneous military and political vicis
situdes. It was therefore significant that in the English-speakin|
countries too—in Great Britain first and foremost, but also in the res
in divers degrees—this age had seen the middle class begin to lose botl
its nineteenth-century prosperity and its sanguine pre-industrial ethos
The psychological change was more portentous than the economic
since it was in virtue of its pre-industrial ethos that the middle class hac
made the industrial fortune that was now slipping out of its hands.

During the period between the Industrial Revolution and the out
break of the First World War, the distinguishing psychological charac
teristic of the middle class, by contrast with the contemporary spiri
of the clerical workers as well as the industrial working class, had beei
its unabated zest for work.

In the citadel of Capitalism on Manhattan Island there had beei
a trivial yet significant illustration of this difference of attitude ai
recently as the year A.D. 1949. In that year the financial houses on Wai
Street were trying, without success, to induce their shorthand-typists
by offers of special remuneration at high overtime rates, to reconside:
a collective decision to refuse henceforth to attend at their offices 01
Saturday mornings. The shorthand-typists' employers were eager t<
devote their own Saturday mornings to work for the sake of retaining
the profits that they would forfeit if they were to submit to this shorten
ing of their own working week; but they had ceased to be able to d<
their own work without having shorthand-typists in attendance to assis
them, and they found themselves unable to persuade these indispensable
collaborators in their business of money-making that the game o
working on Saturdays was worth the candle. The shorthand-typist
took the stand that one day's, or even one half-day's, additional leisure
was worth more to them than any monetary inducement for with'
drawing their demand for this amenity. Additional money in thet
pockets was of no use to them if they had to earn it at the price o
forgoing the additional leisure without which they would have no time
for spending it. In this choice between money and life, they opted fo:
life at the cost of letting the money go, and their employers did no
succeed in persuading them to change their minds. By A.D. 1952 it ha<
begun to look as if, so far from the Wall Street shorthand-typists eve:
being brought round by a monetary inducement to the Wall Stree
financiers' point of view, the financiers might eventually be convertec
by economic adversity to the standpoint of the typists; for by this dat<
even Wall Street was beginning to feel a breeze that had already chille<
once sanguine hearts in Lombard Street.

In the twentieth century of the Christian Era the Western middli
class's opportunities for doing profitable business were being progres-
sively reduced in one Western centre of capitalist activity after another