It seems to me now, that the gulf between the classes of society, in all the white world, is infinitely deeper than the gulf between nations. As a matter of fact, consciousness is above all things international, and any man of culture, no matter what nation he belongs to, has a permanent contact with any other conscious individual of the white race. One must stick to the white race, and not include the Hindus, even, because with them the European culture is super-imposed, as a sort of mimicry of the ruling races. But among the white race, educated peole are very much alike, and can understand one another at once, even though their language be different. There are national idiosyncrasies and national biases. But the dynamic ideas and the conventional emotions and the behaviour are almost identical in the middle-class individuals of any European nation, or of America. There is no true upper class left.
The point is that the content of the consciousness is almost homogeneous in all people of the European culture: and in them all, the consciousness functions in very much the same way. In great things as in small, domestic politics or international finance, internal commerce or a world war, each nation behaves in almost the same way as each other nation: and what is more, thinks the same thoughts, says the same things, re-acts to the same stimuli.
This is, we repeat, the oneness of middle-class Europe. And in all the world there are today only two classes: middle-class and working class.
The cleavage is not vertical: it is horizontal. And there is one line of cleavage only. The middle-class has absorbed the upper class entirely. Kings now belong to the “best” bourgeoisie. The line of cleavage is horizontal. And it cuts through the whole civilised world, horizontally, dividing mankind into two layers, the upper and the lower.
It may be argued that the working classes today are only lower-middle-class. All are striving towards the same goal, to become richer and to have the disposing of riches. Seen from the outside, this is true. Seen from the inside, it is a great fallacy.
