Chapter 74

I say again it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and still more difficult to put into words, but they seem to me in my travels something of this kind. The one set of people feel their whole community to be dependent upon a _gentry_, a class possessed of more than the average of wealth in their society. When people take such a standard, an appetite spreads throughout the whole of the community to reduce all, as far as possible, to the conditions under which a wealthy person would live. While in the other set of peo…