Wealth & Money Quote by John Sergeant Wise

The cool, almost offhand certainty of "very plain" is doing the real work here. Wise frames an absence - no public-school system - as if it were simply the logical outcome of social physics. Not a policy choice, not a contested moral failure, but a natural byproduct of who had money. That rhetorical move matters: it drains the scene of outrage and replaces it with inevitability, the classic voice of a class order explaining itself.

The sentence also smuggles in a definition of education as a private commodity rather than a public obligation. "The wealth of the upper classes" isn't just descriptive; it's the alibi. If elites can buy tutors, why build schools? The subtext is that the people who would have needed a public system most were structurally irrelevant to decision-making. A society organized around private solutions for the powerful has little incentive to create shared institutions for everyone else.

Context sharpens the edges. Wise, writing with the long memory of the postbellum South and the antebellum world it mythologized or dissected, is pointing at how hierarchy reproduces itself. Private tutoring isn't just instruction; it's insulation - from democratic mixing, from common standards, from the idea that citizenship requires a baseline of shared knowledge. The line reads like a small factual note, but it's really a blueprint of how inequality becomes infrastructure: the rich opt out, and the public sphere withers by design.