The Moral of this Narrative. 525 



verdict of so impartial a tribunal, this clanger to seignorial 

 interests is past ! ^ 



But to return to the subject of the Land Laws. We have 

 said quite enough to show that the abolition, either of the 

 custom of primogeniture or of the law of entails, would not 

 tend to nationalise the land more than the Settled Land and 

 Conveyancing Acts have done already. As soon as the land- 

 owner becomes entirely divested of his ancient rights of lord- 

 ship, he will voluntarily avoid the law of intestacy and cease 

 from the practice of entailing. His preference for realty over 

 personalty will have vanished, and he will be anxious to 

 exchange the one for the other. It is possible, therefore, that 

 another century will witness the replacement of the great 

 landowner, and wheat husbandry in the English rural economy 

 by the small freeholder, and vegetable cultivation. But where 

 in such a case shall we look for a substitute of that aristocracy 

 of the soil, which it is part and parcel of the Englishman's 

 idiosyncrasy to venerate ? 



Possibly that old class definition of Regnault's, that our 

 upper classes are an aristocracy of position, our middle classes 

 of imitation, and our lower classes of servility no longer applies,^ 

 but we still maintain that the government of England, though 

 nominally a monarchy, is virtually an aristocracy ; and that 

 the democracy which the same writer quoted above, declared 

 to be " despised by the Tories, feared by the Whigs, courted 

 by the Rads, and misunderstood by the people," could never 

 serve as a fitting substitute. So far, therefore, reforms have 

 but fortified the aristocratic principle,^ and the next question 

 arises as to whether the patricians of the future may not be 

 found among the descendants of those merchant princes who 

 have by their energy and good faith largely aided in building 

 up this great Anglo-Saxon empire. Are then the peer and the 



^ Royal Commission on Mining Royalties, Final Report, p. 79. Par. 

 389, cl. ii. 1893. 



2 Preface to a Translation of Bentham's Catechism, by Elias Regnault. 

 Paris, 1839. 



^ PoiJular Almanack of France for 1814, sz<& voc. " France and Eng- 

 land." M. Sarraus, junior. 



