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APPENDIX 4 sets and motor-cars, though these must be bought on the hirepurchase basis. They want to dress well, and in many cases this is essential to their work also. They wish to enjoy life as people in the films and in the illustrated papers seem to. While they are in employment, they have a chance of realising many of these things, but, because they have no property or alternative means of income, their life is always insecure and they have little prospect of rising in the social scale. The mass civilisation of the present-day bourgeoisie, though its standards and attitude to life are empty and meaningless, appears to the new middle class as a goal worth striving after. The shopgirl, to take only one sociological type, makes her face up, manicures her hands, and does her hair after the manner of the ladies she serves from behind the counter. She tries, in her private life as well as in her appearance, to create an illusion, which compensates her for a salary which is below the average working-class wage, and for the general lack of prospects of her class. We still know very little about the sociological structure of these new social strata, with their new standards and outlook, which are growing up in the existing system. Certainly Tarde's laws of imitation have a decisive bearing on this point. Only a social crisis — revolution or war, or sometimes both — reveals the substitute character of this class's imitation of the upper middle class. The airman, formerly a commercial traveller or bank clerk, who now pilots his Hurricane to victory, knows that after this war he cannot return to the same meaningless way of life. A new social order must be created and he must have a constructive part to play in it.
As a class, the Mittel-Schichten are not well integrated and have not much interest in combining, as the working class does, to improve their material conditions or to make themselves a more powerful political force in the community. They are represented by no political party and have few people in Parliament who will look after their interests there. Unlike the upper middle class, they cannot afford political candidatures, and owing to their inability and aversion to a combination they do not enjoy the opportunities which Trade Unionism gives to the working class. This fact — that they are politically a negative body — makes them a potential danger to the community, since, as happened in Germany and Italy, and recently in France, they will throw their lot in with anyone who seems to promise them the security and opportunities for the exercise of power which they lack. They cannot be appealed to by proletarian slogans, because they have no sympathy with the working class and their one fear is that they will sink down into its
u 305 M.S.F.