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One of the key promises of the nineteenth century was self-advancement, the opening of careers to talent. Significant social mobility, from the working class or the peasantry to the upper-middle class, however, was still very rare in the nineteenth century, although more and more exceptional individual cases could be found. Universities were reserved for the upper 1 percent of society until World War I. There were only 77,000 university students in Germany (population 65 million) in 1913. As late as 1938, there were still only 150,000 university students in Britain, France, and Germany combined. In the nineteenth century, higher education was a closed, male club. But at long last the idea of social mobility could no longer be seen as a myth, for there were enough prominent cases in the business world to give the ideal a basis in reality. Perhaps the twentieth century began, from a historian of social mobility's point of view, with the rise to power of a Welsh coal miner's son, David Lloyd George, to the position of chancellor of the exchequer in 1906.

Lloyd George's rise to prominence was made possible, to a certain extent, by a slow but significant expansion of the middling ranks and the lower-middle class in the three decades before the war. During the period 1870-1914, the lower-middle class, composed of clerks and modestly (but regularly) paid civil servants, mushroomed. People of modest birth were given more and more responsibilities, and gained more and more power in government, especially at the local level.

Social mobility was usually limited to the movement from the (poorly paid sector of ) the working class up to the lower-middle class, or from the lower middle class to the middle class. Scarcely was it possible to make the jump from peasant or proletarian status to respectable middle class. A significant barrier existed between manual and non-manual labor. By 1890 only 7.7 percent of all manual workers in Bochum (Germany) had been able to cross into the non-manual world. By 1907 the figure was still only 18 percent. By contrast, in the United States, in late-nineteenth-century Birmingham, 50 percent of manual workers crossed the barrier into the world of non-manual work. In Atlanta, after one decade 20 percent, or 1 in 5, had crossed the line; in Bochum, only 1 in 13. The primary purpose of Bochum's gymnasium, and of secondary education in Europe in general, seems to have been to ensure status continuity of the middle class and professional class, not to aid social mobility. In France on the eve of World War I, only 5 percent of students went on to secondary education, to what we call high school (lycee). Less than 1 percent of European men went to university at this time. In Germany, 0.1 percent of the population went on to university in 1909. . .

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