READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



than any other was fostered the shameful jobbery of former days, 

 when the church, the army, and the civil service were refuges 

 for the privileged destitute, and junior members of the aristocracy 

 were said to rely on the budget for their ways and means. Now 

 that patronage has been most properly restricted, that capital and 

 mercantile connection is almost essential for success in business, 

 and that even the bar is becoming more and more dependent on 

 the lower branch of the legal profession, it is very doubtful 

 whether younger sons of county families stand a fair chance in 

 the race of life against young men of the middle class with equal 

 fortunes, more active backing, less sensitive feelings, and a more 

 utilitarian education. If they have no right to complain of a lot 

 which appears very enviable to most of their countrymen, and 

 which only needs exceptional energy to make it so, yet they owe 

 no gratitude to a system which inverts the natural order of human 

 life, accustoming them to ease and luxury in youth, but offering 

 them no adequate provision either for an early settlement or for 

 an early retirement. 



From every point of view, then, we are led to an adverse 

 judgment on the extreme development of primogeniture estab- 

 lished in England by the joint operation of law and custom. It 

 must be condemned, politically, as aggravating the perilous dual- 

 ism of town and country ; as affording the very minimum of 

 constitutional stability to be derived from the conservative instincts 

 of proprietorship ; and as giving a very limited body of landlords 

 a preponderance in the State, none the less unreasonable and 

 obnoxious because it is defended on the untenable ground that it 

 is bound up with the existence of the Upper House. It must be 

 condemned, socially, because it helps to stereotype the caste-like 

 organisation of English classes " in horizontal layers," setting up 

 in thousands of country parishes a territorial autocracy, which, 

 however benevolently exercised, keeps the farming and labouring 

 population in an abnormal state of dependence on a single land- 

 owner, while the rural districts have gradually been deserted by 

 the lesser gentry who helped to bridge over the chasm between 

 rich and poor in ancient times. It must be condemned, econom- 

 ically, because it cramps the free play of economical laws in 



