Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/21

 few of the wealthiest families had “risen from the ranks.” But in general the social and the economic classification was identical. As a “county” town Derby held among its residents a few remnants of aristocratic families, which mixed somewhat shyly with a small upper middle class composed of the pick of the professions, clergy, doctors, and lawyers, and leading officials of the town. The general run of professional men and the more prosperous manufacturers or wholesale merchants formed a social class, less fixed in personnel, but quite distinct from the retail traders whose name over their shops kept them on a definitely lower social level, though their incomes and education were hardly distinguishable from the professional strata. Clerks in banks and offices had a lower measure of precarious respectability, but were distinguishable from all grades of manual workers. The bulk of these latter were employees of the Midland Railway or of the new manufactures that were springing up to replace the earlier and now decaying textile factories. At the bottom of the social-industrial ladder was a considerable batch of poor, irregular workers, largely of Irish origin, many of whom occupied a street bearing the sinister title “Back Lane.” The poverty of these families was attributed by common consent to their shiftless, thriftless, reckless way of living, and formed a difficult problem not of social management but of charity. I well recollect the ragged, shoeless condition of the children of these “poor.” They