"“What a strange religion, then,” Arnold writes in an 1860 essay, “is our religion of inequality!” The rigidity of the British class structure he rightly sees as an obsolete artifact from a bygone age, and the root of all problems:

[T]he great inequality of classes and property, which came to us from the Middle Age and which we maintain because we have the religion of inequality…has the natural and necessary effect, under present circumstances, of materialising our upper class, vulgarising our middle class, and  brutalising our lower class. And this is to fail in civilisation.

Ever the aesthete, Arnold was also a staunch believer in culture.  To him, culture was not just the hallmark of civilization; it was the entire point of civilization. Corroded culture he sees as a symptom of social inequality."

Sunday Pages: "Dover Beach", by @gregolear