And while it was in the heyday of its power the bourgeoisie managed to permeate the working class with its ideals, habits and modes of thought, perhaps more than any ruling class ever influenced a subject class. This was due, on the one hand, to the unprecedentedly large extent to which the working class has been permitted to participate in the benefits resulting from the general spread of knowledge, and on the other hand to the peculiarly forcible way in which the economic argument is brought home to the modern workingman. Under no preceding social system have the economic woes of the ruling class been so quickly and with such dreadful effect reflected to the subject-class. We must never, therefore, forget the great importance which the influence of the bourgeois ideology has on the modern proletariat, particularly in the early stages of its development, although, as we shall see later, during and by virtue of its development it formulates an ideaology of its own.
The capitalistic "ideas" and habits of mind are inculcated into the working class by the capitalist class, intentionally and unintentionally, by and through its lower stratum, or what is usually called the "middle class." So long as there is a large and virile middle class the working class will be largely under its domination and influence, morally and æsthetically. It is with this class that the working class comes into immediate contact socially. It is on this class that the workingman fixes his hopes and aspirations for the future. It is this class that teaches him at kindergarten and at school, that preaches to him at church and in "ethical" societies, and it is this class that gathers and sifts for him the news of the world and explains it to him in his daily newspaper, and gives him his popular science, his art and his "literature."
It is because of those "ideal" characteristics of the old-fashioned bourgeoisie, the old middle-class of capitalist society, and even more so because of the "ideal" influences of that class on the working class, that Marx con-
