ABSTRACT
In rural life there were three classes, but in industrial life there were only two. The landowner, as a rule, did not choose to live amid the grime and smoke and squalor of factories or mines; even if, for a while, he lingered in a neighbourhood which had been rural in his father’s time, he had little contact with the rising class of industrial employers, whom he regarded as vulgar and uneducated. The relations of the landowning class with the mill-owners were, for the most part, political rather than social. They had a common interest in suppressing disturbances, but on most points their interests diverged. There was an import duty on raw cotton which the manufacturers resented. The duty on grain increased the price of bread, and therefore the cost of keeping a labourer alive; the extra wages which this obliged the manufacturer to pay ultimately found their way into the pocket of the landowner in the shape of rent for agricultural land. The manufacturer desired free trade, the landowner believed in protection; the manufacturer was often a nonconformist, the landowner almost always belonged to the Church of England; the manufacturer had picked up his education as best he could, and had risen from poverty by thrift and industry, while the landowner had been at a public school and was the son of his father.
