THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 387 



been strained to the utmost, instead of being exercised for the 

 most part with forbearance and discretion, legislative interference 

 would assuredly have been needed to avert a revolutionary solu- 

 tion of the English land question. Very serious issues, too, have 

 already arisen in England upon which the interests of rural land- 

 owners have been ostensibly in antagonism with those of the 

 commercial and industrial classes. Still more serious risks of 

 collision between town and country are foreshadowed by recent 

 events in France, where the millions of peasant proprietors con- 

 stitute the one great barrier against communism. Were it possible 

 to imagine a similar crisis occurring in England, it is to be feared 

 that no similar barrier could be presented by the handful of great 

 proprietors, however powerful their existing influence, who have 

 profited so enormously, and with so little effort of their own, by 

 the growing prosperity of the country during the present century. 

 In the next place we cannot and must not ignore the less 

 favourable aspect of primogeniture, in its relation to public life 

 and national energy. Mr. W. L. Newman, in a remarkable essay 

 on the "English Land Laws," speaks of their tendency "to 

 establish in the centre of each family a magnificently fed and 

 coloured drone, the incarnation of wealth and social dignity, 

 the visible end of human endeavour, a sort of great final cause, 

 immanent in every family." Without adopting this somewhat 

 invidious conception of the system, w 7 e may well ask ourselves 

 whether it is, on the whole, for the public good to encourage the 

 development of a class wholly dependent on birth, and independ- 

 ent of merit, for the command of all that makes life desirable. 

 Berkeley asks, "What right hath an eldest son to the worst 

 education ? " and Bacon, after describing a new expedient for 

 defeating the recent legislation against entails, touches in a preg- 

 nant sentence the very bottom of this question : " Therefore it is 

 worthy of good consideration whether it be better for the subject 

 and sovereign to have lands secured to men's names and blood 

 by perpetuities, with all the inconveniences above-mentioned, or 

 to be free, with hazard of undoing his house by unthrifty pos- 

 terity." No doubt primogeniture creates a "leisure class," but is 

 this an unmixed benefit ? " Leisure " may be essential to aesthetic 



