6

The Founding Virtues

In which it is argued that the feasibility of the American project has historically been based on industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity; and that these aspects of American life can be used to frame the analysis of changes in white America from 1960 to 2010.

IN 1825, FRANCIS Grund, seventh son of a German baron, educated in Vienna, decided to seek his fortune in the New World. After spending a year as a professor of mathematics at the Brazilian military academy, he moved on to the United States and settled in Philadelphia. A decade later, he published a two-volume appraisal of the American experiment from a European’s perspective titled The Americans, in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations. Midway through the first volume, he observed that “no government could be established on the same principle as that of the United States, with a different code of morals.”

The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.1

The idea that Americans were “habitually correct in their actions” was not one shared by all European observers. On the contrary, many visitors to the United States at about the same time were appalled by American behavior.

There was American hygiene, as noted by the Duc de Liancourt, who found that Americans were “astonished that one should object to sleeping two or three in the same bed and in dirty sheets, or to drink from the same dirty glass after half a score of others.”2 All foreign observers agreed that the amount of spitting, everywhere, indoors and out, was disgusting.

There was the American diet. “I will venture to say,” declared one European visitor, “that if a prize were proposed for the scheme of a regimen most calculated to injure the stomach, the teeth, and the health in general, no better could be invented than that of the Americans,” who “swallow, almost without chewing, hot bread, half baked, toast soaked in butter, cheese of the fattest kind, slices of salt or hung beef, ham, etc., all which are nearly insoluble.”3

There was the prodigious drinking. Americans from adolescence onward drank at every meal—not the wine or beer of Europe, but the fiery rye whiskey of the New World. William Cobbett saw alcohol as the national disease. Young men, “even little boys, at or under twelve years of age, go into stores and tip off their drams” at all hours, he wrote.4

Not even the society to be found in the town houses of Philadelphia was really up to standard, Europeans sniffed. In his history of the period, Henry Adams quoted one foreign observer who was offended to discover that both married women and maidens at Philadelphia tea parties “were given to indecent allusions, indelicate expressions, and even at times immoral innuendoes. A loud laugh or a coarse exclamation followed each of these.”5

And yet Grund’s observation about the United States at the end of its first half century would not have surprised the founders. Everyone involved in the creation of the United States knew that its success depended on virtue in its citizenry—not gentility, but virtue. “No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure,” James Madison famously observed at the Virginia ratifying convention. “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”6

It was chimerical because of the nearly unbridled freedom that the American Constitution allowed the citizens of the new nation. Americans were subject to criminal law, which forbade the usual crimes against person and property, and to tort law, which regulated civil disputes. But otherwise, Americans faced few legal restrictions on their freedom of action and no legal obligations to their neighbors except to refrain from harming them. The guides to their behavior at any more subtle level had to come from within.

For Benjamin Franklin, this meant that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” On the other hand, virtue makes government easy to sustain: “The expense of our civil government we have always borne, and can easily bear, because it is small. A virtuous and laborious people may be cheaply governed.”7

For Patrick Henry, it seemed a truism that “bad men cannot make good citizens.… No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.” George Washington said much the same thing in the undelivered version of his first inaugural address, asserting that “no Wall of words, no mound of parchment can be formed as to stand against the sweeping torrent of boundless ambition on the one side, aided by the sapping current of corrupted morals on the other.”8 Or as he put it most simply in his Farewell Address: “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” In their various ways, the founders recognized that if a society is to remain free, self-government refers first of all to individual citizens governing their own behavior.

The Americans may not have been genteel, but, as a people, they met the requirements of virtue. The European traveler who was offended by American women at Philadelphia tea parties failed to understand the distinction between American manners and American morals, Henry Adams wrote:

Yet public and private records might be searched long, before they revealed evidence of misconduct [of American women] such as filled the press and formed one of the commonest topics of conversation in the society of England and France.… The society of 1800 was often coarse and sometimes brutal, but, except for intemperance, was moral.9

Adams was not being chauvinistic. “Although the travelers who have visited North America differ on a great number of points,” Tocqueville wrote, “they all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere.”10

WHAT DID ADAMS, writing in the 1880s; Grund and Tocqueville, writing a half century earlier; and the founders, writing a half century before that, have in mind when they spoke of virtue in the people?

Different writers stressed different aspects of the topic, and they could be parsed in several ways. But if there is no canonical list, four aspects of American life were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion. For convenience, I will refer to all four as the founding virtues.

Some of the founders would say my list is incomplete, with frugality being one candidate for addition, and philanthropy (or benevolence) another. American conservatives today might chide me for omitting self-reliance, a concept that overlaps with industriousness but was not prominent on its own until well into the nineteenth century. The four I have decided upon meet this test: Would any of those who shaped the American project and observed it in its first century say that it could succeed without industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religiosity in the people? For these four, there is no doubt about the answer. No.

Industriousness

The founders talked about this virtue constantly, using the eighteenth-century construction, industry. To them, industry signified a cluster of qualities that had motivated the Revolution in the first place—a desire not just to be free to speak one’s mind, to practice religion as one saw fit, and to be taxed only with representation, but the bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better life for oneself and one’s children. I will use the more familiar modern term industriousness instead of industry, but I have the same broad sense of the word in mind.

American industriousness fascinated the rest of the world. No other American quality was so consistently seen as exceptional. Francis Grund made it the subject of the opening paragraph of his book:

Active occupation is not only the principal source of [the Americans’] happiness, and the foundation of their natural greatness, but they are absolutely wretched without it.… [It] is the very soul of an American; he pursues it, not as a means of procuring for himself and his family the necessary comforts of life, but as the fountain of all human felicity.11

Underlying the willingness to do the work was the abundance of opportunity that America offered as a lure, and it affected people in every class. Henry Adams pointed out that it affected those on the bottom of American society more powerfully than those on the top.

Reversing the old-world system, the American stimulant increased in energy as it reached the lowest and most ignorant class, dragging and whirling them upward as in the blast of a furnace. The penniless and homeless Scotch or Irish immigrant was caught and consumed by it; for every stroke of the axe and the hoe made him a capitalist, and made gentlemen of his children.… The instinct of activity, once created, seemed heritable and permanent in the race.12

Not all visitors thought this American industriousness so very admirable, because it was closely linked with what they saw as an undesirable obsession with money. “An English shop-keeper is a tradesman all morning, but a gentleman in the evening,” wrote one English visitor approvingly, whereas the Americans—New Englanders were especially egregious offenders—never put aside business. “Mammon has no more zealous worshipper than your true Yankee,” he continued. “His homage is not merely that of the lip, or of the knee; it is an entire prostration of the heart; the devotion of all powers, bodily and mental, to the service of the idol.”13

A side effect of this passion for industriousness was embarrassment at being thought a failure. Francis Grund wrote that during a decade of life in the United States, “I have never known a native American to ask for charity. No country in the world has such a small number of persons supported at the public expense.… An American, embarrassed by his pecuniary circumstances, can hardly be prevailed upon to ask or accept the assistance of his own relations; and will, in many instances, scorn to have recourse to his own parents.”14

If just one American virtue may be said to be defining, industriousness is probably it.

Honesty

The importance of honesty in making a limited government work is self-evident—nothing short of a police state will force people to refrain from crime if they are predisposed otherwise, and an assumption that people will follow the rules is indispensable for making a free market work. The founders could see that as easily as we. For Thomas Jefferson, “honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”15 George Washington was himself legendarily honest (as in the cherry tree tale), and twice he included honesty in lists of virtues necessary in the American people.16 Along with the importance of honesty went the belief that Americans were more honest than the Europeans, who were believed to be corrupt. Thus John Adams would look glumly upon the prospects for republicanism in the Netherlands or France. What was the difference between their revolutions and the American one? “It is a want of honesty; and if the common people in America lose their integrity, they will soon set up tyrants of their own.”17 Conversely, Jefferson was optimistic about assimilating European immigrants to the United States because, while they would bring their European vices with them, “these, I think, will soon be diluted and evaporated in a country of plain honesty.”18

There is reason to think that Americans were in fact unusually law-abiding.19 One of the rare quantitative analyses of crime in the early years of the new nation examined all the court cases in Massachusetts’s Middlesex County, which embraced the most populous part of Massachusetts outside Boston. Over the period 1760–1810, the annual number of prosecutions for theft averaged 2.7 per 10,000 population.20 Even considering that the number represents prosecutions, not the occurrence of thefts, it seems safe to conclude that the crime rate was extraordinarily low.21

The exception to America’s low levels of crime was probably the crime now known as aggravated assault. European visitors were fascinated and horrified by the streak of violence in American frontier life, filling pages of their letters home and their published accounts with descriptions of the spontaneous street fights in which gouging, biting, and kicking were all permitted, and which the spectators treated as a diverting pastime. But while these fights technically constituted aggravated assault, they were seldom the result of one citizen gratuitously attacking a peaceable stranger. Much of frontier violence seems to have been consensual.22

We have no more glimpses of crime rates until the middle of the nineteenth century, but the stance of Americans toward crime remained as hostile as any of the founders could have wished. When Tocqueville was traveling around America to observe our prisons (the original reason for his visit), he commented on how few magistrates and public officers America employed for apprehending crime, “yet I believe that in no country does crime more rarely elude punishment. The reason is that every one conceives himself to be interested in furnishing evidence of the crime and in seizing the delinquent.… In America, [the criminal] is looked upon as an enemy of the human race, and the whole of mankind is against him.”23

Americans certainly saw themselves that way—to the point of tedium, in a Scottish writer’s view, so often was the European visitor asked “whether he does not admire the extraordinary respect which the people pay to the law.”24 Francis Grund thought the pride was justified. Americans have an “unbounded respect for the law,” he wrote. “There exists in the United States an universal submission to the law, and a prompt obedience to the magistrates, which, with the exception of Great Britain, is not to be found in any other country.”25

Marriage

The founders took for granted that marriage was the bedrock institution of society. One of the few explicit discussions during the Revolutionary era is found in James Wilson’s Lectures on Law:

Whether we consult the soundest deductions of reason, or resort to the best information conveyed to us by history, or listen to the undoubted intelligence communicated in holy writ, we shall find, that to the institution of marriage the true origin of society must be traced.… To that institution, more than to any other, have mankind been indebted for the share of peace and harmony which has been distributed among them. “Prima societas in ipso conjugio est,” [“The first bond of society is marriage”] says Cicero in his book of offices; a work which does honor to the human understanding and the human heart.26

The question for the founders and for commentators in the nineteenth century was not whether marriage itself was essential to the functioning of society—of course it was—but about behavior within marriage. You may have noticed in this chapter’s opening quotations how often the word morality was used. Typically, morality referred simply to fidelity within marriage and to the permanence of marriage. John Adams, whose fifty-four years with Abigail Adams constitute one of America’s historic marriages, confided to his diary, “The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families.… How is it possible that children can have any just sense of the sacred obligations of morality or religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their mothers?”27 On another occasion, he was alluding to the French liberal divorce law of 1792 when he referred to the “sacred bands of marriage” and called on young people to “beware of contaminating your country with the foul abominations of the French revolution.”28

Were the Americans in fact more faithful to the marriage vows than the Europeans? Everyone thought so, Americans and foreigners alike. Even Harriet Martineau, an Englishwoman who resided in Cincinnati for several years and was a radical feminist long before the phrase was invented, thought that “marriage is in America more nearly universal, more safe, more tranquil, more fortunate than in England,” and that “the outward requisites to happiness are nearly complete, and the institution is purified from the grossest of the scandals which degrade it in the Old World.”29 She wasn’t happy with the situation in the United States, and grumbled that it was deteriorating, but she conceded that Americans did give women a better break than the Europeans did.

Practicing What They Preached, Mostly

Historians can never know for certain about these things, but the core group of founders appears to have been good husbands, with a caveat for one, plus one notorious exception.

George Washington enjoyed flirting with handsome women and presumably had abundant opportunities to carry things further, but none of the scholars of his exhaustively examined life have found evidence of infidelity, and his correspondence with Martha indicates a close bond. John and Abigail Adams were one of the most celebrated husband-wife pairs in American history. The debate about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings goes on, but no one alleges that he strayed while his wife was alive. James and Dolley Madison were such a devoted couple that historians have only a handful of letters between them—they arranged their lives so that they spent very little time apart. John Jay and Sarah Jay did leave an extensive correspondence (along with six children) documenting an enduring and loving marriage.

The caveat is required for Alexander Hamilton. He had eight children with his wife, Elizabeth, and they remained a loving couple until his death, but he did have a known affair with a con man’s wife.

And then there’s Benjamin Franklin. He had a common-law marriage of forty-four years with Deborah (they couldn’t have a civil ceremony because her first husband had disappeared and they couldn’t prove that he was dead). The Franklins established a modus vivendi that left her, as she sometimes signed herself, “your A Feck SHONET Wife,” but he began their cohabitation by bringing his illegitimate son from a previous liaison into the family circle, and he had dalliances throughout his life. Most of them were the unconsummated flirtation that the French call amitié amoureuse, but by no means all of them.

American exceptionalism with regard to marriage went beyond simple fidelity, however. Marriage in the United States was seen as a different kind of union than marriage in Europe. Part of the difference consisted of America’s rejection of arranged marriages. But the ramifications went further than that. Men courted, but the women accepted or rejected, and the knowledge that a little girl would eventually have the responsibility for evaluating prospective mates affected her upbringing. “If democratic nations leave a woman at liberty to choose her husband,” Tocqueville wrote,

 … they take care to give her mind sufficient knowledge, and her will sufficient strength, to make so important a choice. As in America paternal discipline is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict, a young woman does not contract the latter without considerable circumspection and apprehension. Precocious marriages are rare. Thus American women do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened; whereas in other countries most women generally only begin to exercise and to ripen their understandings after marriage.30

American marriages were different from European ones (or so both Americans and foreign observers seemed to agree) in the solemnity of the marital bond. Americans “consider marriage as a covenant which is often onerous, but every condition of which the parties are strictly bound to fulfill, because they knew all those conditions beforehand, and were perfectly free not to have contracted them.”31

To Tocqueville, the effects on American culture were profound, and had largely to do with the role that American marriage gave to America’s women. Near the end of Democracy in America, he summarized his position with a remarkable passage. “If I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.”32

Francis Grund presented a similar analysis, and then summarized the effects of strong marriages on American life:

I consider the domestic virtue of the Americans as the principal source of all their other qualities. It acts as a promoter of industry, as a stimulus to enterprise, and as the most powerful restrainer of public vice. It reduces life to its simplest elements, and makes happiness less dependent on precarious circumstances; it ensures the proper education of children, and acts, by the force of example, on the morals of the rising generation; in short, it does more for the preservation of peace and good order, than all the laws enacted for that purpose; and is a better guarantee for the permanency of the American government, than any written instrument, the Constitution itself not excepted.33

The American concept of marriage demanded a lot of both parties, but it was seen as the fundamental institution of civil society in a free nation.

Religiosity

The founders were products of the Enlightenment, if more of the Scottish variety than of the French, and many of them held a view of Christianity that would have been unthinkable a century earlier. Jefferson was openly a Deist. Benjamin Franklin frequently invoked the language of religion, but rarely attended church and did not believe in the divinity of Christ, nor did John Adams, a practicing Unitarian. Washington was evasive about his views on traditional Christian doctrine. Hamilton and Madison were Anglicans who were also suspected to be less than orthodox about the details. And yet all were united in this: Religion was essential to the health of the new nation. They made the case in similar terms, which Catholic philosopher Michael Novak summarized this way:

Liberty is the object of the Republic.

Liberty needs virtue.

Virtue among the people is impossible without religion.34

George Washington put it explicitly in his Farewell Address: “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable.… Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”35

It is a nuanced statement, with Washington accepting that it is possible to be moral without believing in a personal God (he probably had Jefferson in mind with that wonderful clause “Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure”), but also saying that you cannot expect a whole nation of people to be that way. John Adams made the same argument less elliptically:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.36

For Adams, the essence of politically useful religion was the Judaic monotheistic God. “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation,” he wrote, by propagating “to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”37 James Madison echoed the sentiment when he wrote that “the belief in a God All Powerful, wise, and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.”38

Jefferson agreed. Writing in Notes on the State of Virginia, he asked, “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not violated but with his wrath?”39 This appreciation of the role of religious belief, and specifically Christianity, is consistent with Jefferson’s church attendance during his presidency. A diary of the era records an encounter in which Jefferson is chided for hypocrisy as he walks to church one Sunday “with a large red prayer book under his arm.” Jefferson reportedly responded that “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good day sir.” It is a secondhand account and may have been embroidered in the retelling, but the sentiment is consistent with Jefferson’s well-documented admiration for the moral code expressed in Jesus’s teachings.40 “Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus,” he wrote, and invested great effort in compiling what became known as the “Jefferson Bible,” the teachings of Jesus stripped of miracles and theology.41 Benjamin Franklin took the same position. “As to Jesus of Nazareth,” he wrote to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, “I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see.” He thought that belief in Jesus’s divinity did no harm “if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and observed.”42 Many others saw the Christian Bible’s teachings of humility, self-denial, brotherly kindness, and the golden rule as precisely what a self-governing democracy needed—“It is the most republican book in the world,” in John Adams’s words.43

The same relationship between religiosity and a functioning limited government was asserted by observers of American life, including secular ones, for the next century. As on so many other topics, Tocqueville summed it up best of all, and I have nothing to add to his appraisal:

Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust. Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but it must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it. Indeed, it is in this same point of view that the inhabitants of the United States themselves look upon religious belief. I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religion—for who can search the human heart?—but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.… The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.44

Since the 1830s

Until well into the twentieth century, all four of the founding virtues were seen much as they were in the first half century of the nation’s existence. They were accepted as well by the children of immigrants within a few years of getting off the boat. Describing in detail how this feat was accomplished would take a book of its own, but a major part of the answer is that America used the schoolhouse to relentlessly socialize its children. In effect, American children were taught a national civil religion consisting largely of the virtues I just described.

The main vehicle for nineteenth-century socialization was the reading textbook used in elementary school, the variants of which were modeled on the overwhelmingly most popular series, the McGuffey Readers. They were so widely used that selections in them became part of the national language. When Theodore Roosevelt once told a newspaper reporter that he had “no intention of becoming an international Meddlesome Mattie” by injecting himself into some foreign dispute,45 he could assume everybody would know what he meant because the story about Meddlesome Mattie had been part of McGuffey’s Fourth Reader in all its editions since 1853. Theodore Roosevelt, scion of an elite New York family, schooled by private tutors, had been raised on the same textbooks as the children of Ohio farmers, Chicago tradesmen, and New England fishermen. If you want to know what constituted being a good American from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I, spend a few hours browsing through the selections in the McGuffey Readers (the full texts are available at Google Books). They are filled with readings that touch on the founding virtues.

Stereotype and Reality About the McGuffey Readers

When people today think of the McGuffey Readers at all, it is likely to be with condescension, looking upon them as collections of stories that were perhaps suitable for a less enlightened time but that would be unacceptable today. If you browse the Readers, you may find yourself surprised. You will have a hard time finding references to women as the weaker sex or to women as inferior to men in any way, and many cases in which women are exemplars of courage and fortitude. The Readers do not celebrate macho virtues but emphasize the gentle in gentleman. American Indians are not portrayed as savages, but as humans displaying the same virtues that are extolled for everyone. Similarly, there are many stories set in foreign countries, but no invidious comparisons of foreigners with Americans. The religious teachings in the Readers after midcentury were religiously ecumenical, including, for example, both the twenty-third psalm from the Hebrew Bible and the Sermon on the Mount from the New Testament, but with no passages (that I found) that explicitly presented Christian doctrine.

The most obvious lacuna in the Readers is race. In the Readers I reviewed, I found no reference to African Americans at all, positive or negative—perhaps because the people who chose the selections realized that if the Readers addressed race in the same tolerant and egalitarian tone they applied to everything else, many Southern schools would stop using them.

By the mid-twentieth century, the idea that school was a place to instill a particular set of virtues through systematic socialization had been rejected, the McGuffey Readers had disappeared, and so had some of the coherence in the idea of what it meant to be a good American. This is not to say that the practice of the virtues had decayed, but that the American civic religion had evolved. The idea of America as the land of opportunity was still prevalent. The Constitution was still seen as the bedrock on which the nation stood. Americans still saw their country as the freest, most prosperous, and best country in the world. The idea of “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” was drummed into the heads of schoolchildren every morning with the Pledge of Allegiance. But the belief that being a good American involved behaving in certain kinds of ways, and that the nation itself relied upon a certain kind of people in order to succeed, had begun to fade and has not revived. It came to be tacitly assumed that the American system itself would work under any circumstances as long as we got the laws right.

To people who share that assumption, the reasonable response to my account of the founding virtues is to ask “So what?” So what if Americans began the nation with a romanticized view of their own virtue, and managed to transmit that romanticized view for the next century and a half? America at the founding was a small, sparsely populated country of farmers, with half the nation operating a system of chattel slavery. The virtues were never as universally observed as Americans wanted to think, and in any case they are not relevant today. None of the great political, economic, or social issues that face the nation in the twenty-first century are going to be informed by seeing where America stands today on the founding virtues.

I take another view: The founders were right. The success of America depended on virtue in the people when the country began and it still does in the twenty-first century. America will remain exceptional only to the extent that its people embody the same qualities that made it work for the first two centuries of its existence. The founding virtues are central to that kind of citizenry. That’s why the following chapters use them as a framework for describing the formation of the new lower class.