“The massive contempt of the ‘civilized’ for the ‘barbarians’ (who included the bulk of the labouring poor at home) rested on this feeling of demonstrated superiority.”

— Hobsbawm. Age of Revolution
ch. 10

"The hierarchical society was thus recreated on the foundations of formal equality. It had merely lost what made it tolerable in the old days."

-- ibid.

"Faced with a social catastrophe they did not understand, impoverished, herded into slums, many sank into despair.

"Mass alcoholism, an almost invariable companion of headlong industrialization and urbanization, spread 'a pestilence of hard liquor' across Europe."

-- ibid.

"Urban development was a gigantic process of class segregation, which pushed the new laboring poor into great morasses of misery outside the centres of government and business and from the newly specialized residential areas of the bourgeoisie."

"Drinking was not the only sign of this demoralization. Infanticide, prostitution, suicide, and mental derangement have all been brought into relation with this social and economic cataclysm."

"The spread of apocalyptic, mystical, or other sects and cults in this period indicates a similar incapacity to deal with the earthquakes of society that were breaking down men's lives."