514 History of the English Landed Interest. 



This defect in Mill's premisses cannot but defeat his conclu- 

 sion. " But if," he sums up, " the State is at liberty to treat 

 the possessors of land as public functionaries, it is only going a 

 step further to say that it is at liberty to discard them." 



What becomes of such a theory if the magisterial powers 

 attached to the manor take precedence, as regards antiquity, 

 over those attached to the State ? The patria potestas of the 

 family system was ceded to fhe primus inter pares ] the powers 

 of the latter were, in their turn, relegated to the oligarchy, 

 and passed on by this species of State Government to the 

 monarchy. History, in fact, tends to prove ' that there was a 

 gradual blending together, not a sub-division of magisterial 

 rights, a centralising instead of a decentralising process, 

 though the monopolisation of all government by one indi- 

 vidual was never suffered for long. Those magisterial powers 

 therefore which remain to the landlord after his surrender of 

 the greater portion in exchange for the rights of landowner- 

 ship, cannot in justice be abstracted by the State, on the plea 

 advanced by Mill. "Whether the State was the original donor 

 of these rights, or whether they were arbitrarily abstracted 

 from the primus inter pares^ does not however matter, for by 

 the first principles of private property, admitted even by Mill, 

 long enjoyment creates a prescriptive right to ownership. 



Notwithstanding this, as the century draws to its close, 

 we witness the landlord gradually divested of his few re- 

 maining rights of sac and soc, until the question cannot but 

 arise, whether, as in the case of the ecclesiastical landlord 

 at the Reformation, the great lay-landowner will ever be con- 

 sidered by a majority of his countrymen as an anachronism ? 

 AYhat will be his future at the close of another century ? No 

 one can foretell how long the hereditary right of the Peer to 

 legislate, which owes its origin to the ancient claim of the 

 tenant in capite to a seat in the Curia Eegis, will be suffered to 

 remain. The political supremacy of the landlord was wrested 

 from him by the Reform Bills. Most of his powers over the 

 peasant went early in this century. The last traces of his 

 administrative rights are vested in the justices of the peace ; 

 a property qualification being still supposed to limit the candi- 



