It has no veneration for property or property-rights, no love of economic independence, and consequently no constitutional abhorrence of "paternalism" or of socialism. All this "class" cares for is its income, and that is why its ideologists, the social reformers of all grades and shades, put so much stock in the question of income and always push it to the foreground. To the old bourgeois, in control of his property, it was a question of freedom and independence; he looked upon socialism as upon the coming slavery, he abhorred it for its very comforts which everybody shared alike. Not so with the new middle class. Any one of them is ready at any moment to change his windy existence for a governmental job, service of some corporation or any other occupation, provided his income will not be diminished, or even if it is diminished to a certain extent, provided it is assured to him for any length of time. For it must be remembered that this new middle class suffers just as much from insecurity of income as the working class, if not more, to which must be added insecurity of position. It is very natural that a "class" so all up in the air should not form any firmly rooted ideology of its own, that it should be drifting all the time, and should, therefore, be almost worthless as a social force either for or against the introduction of a new order. But, on the other hand, it is, because of the very nature of its social existence, extremely restless, ever ready to change, and ever longing for a change which would finally do away, or at least alleviate, its unsettledness, give it a rest. "Governmental interference" has no terrors for it. It feels the need of a stronger hand than that of the individual in arranging the field of battle for the struggle for existence. If such a makeshift may be dignified into an ideology, its ideology is State Socialism.
But it is not only the property-less, only-in-name, middle class that has lost its old bourgeois ideology. The remnants of the old middle class, the stockholding small capitalists, have lost their ideology with the control of their property. For it was that control, the individual enterprise,
