This chapter examines the development of an ideology of middle-class behaviour based on the ability to save and to maintain enough capital to prevent a cash flow crisis that would result in being arrested or imprisoned. This led to a new type of class-based thinking about society that was closely linked to the security that new forms of capital provided to successful savers. Such individuals were those who were able to accumulate large amounts of capital through entrepreneurship or inheritance, and not dissipate it though overspending. This was a small elite group who gradually came to be termed the middle class, to differentiate themselves from the middling sort of smaller traders. They also increasingly thought of their capital as a form of property created out of righteousness, and that the role of the law was to protect it from those who were less able.