How many women's views on the "servant question" are
little more than the reflection of their own treatment of their
servants? The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble
upon a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to
make it the representative of a whole class.
A great deal of confusion arises when people decline to classify
themselves as we have classified them. Prophecy would be so much
easier if only they would stay where we put them. But, as a matter of
fact, a phrase like the working class will cover only some of the
truth for a part of the time. When you take all the people, below a
certain level of income, and call them the working class, you cannot
help assuming that the people so classified will behave in accordance
with your stereotype. Just who those people are you are not quite
certain. Factory hands and mine workers fit in more or less, but farm
hands, small farmers, peddlers, little shop keepers, clerks, servants,
soldiers, policemen, firemen slip out of the net. The tendency, when
you are appealing to the "working class," is to fix your attention on
two or three million more or less confirmed trade unionists, and treat
them as Labor; the other seventeen or eighteen million, who might
qualify statistically, are tacitly endowed with the point of view
ascribed to the organized nucleus. How very misleading it was to
impute to the British working class in 1918-1921 the point of view
expressed in the resolutions of the Trades Union Congress or in the
pamphlets written by intellectuals.
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