290 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



into sheep farms, the mansions into farmhouses, and the 

 noble pleasure-grounds into market-gardens. But they 

 entirely overlook the fact that the real wealth of the coun- 

 try will certainly be greater than ever, and that every 

 mansion now existing, and many additional ones, will still 

 be occupied, possibly with less of display and magnificence, 

 but often with more of taste and high cultivation. The 

 mere fact that thousands of educated men who now live 

 comparatively idle live on the rents of their ancestral 

 estates will be converted into workers of one kind or 

 another, must surely be a source of additional wealth and 

 power to the nation. During the transition state (all 

 checks in the way of entail having been abolished) the 

 surplus revenues from the land, or the proceeds of its sale, 

 will be gradually invested in other ways. Some of it 

 will go into genuine industrial enterprises of various kinds ; 

 while it is not improbable that the personal management 

 and improvement of a great agricultural estate (of which 

 a park and mansion may still form the central part) will 

 come to be considered as the proper and most honourable 

 occupation for the descendants of the landed aristocracy. 

 The great landowner and country gentleman of that day, 

 with an estate of many thousand acres, employing hun- 

 dreds of labourers and supporting thousands of cattle, 

 using the best machinery and manures, developing in 

 every possible way the productive capacity of the soil, 

 and as proud of the health, comfort, and well-being of his 

 men as of the breed and condition of his horses and his 

 oxen, would certainly not be an unworthy successor of 

 the great landowner of to-day, who receives his rents 

 from half-a-dozen counties, and possesses mansions which 

 he never inhabits and estates which he never visits but for 

 purposes of sport. 



The impossibility of having any land except for personal 

 occupation would render it necessary that agriculture 

 should be studied as a part of every gentleman's education, 

 in order that whatever land he had around his country- 

 house, whether park or home farm, might be not only a 

 source of pleasure but of profit ; and this wide extension 

 of agricultural knowledge would certainly become a source 



