388 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



and intellectual culture, but it is the leisure earned by honourable 

 exertion or guaranteed by a discriminating use of endowments, 

 not the leisure inherited as a right attaching to private property. 

 It would be difficult, indeed, to show that our peerage and landed 

 aristocracy, with all their overwhelming advantages, have contrib- 

 uted one-half so much to science, literature, or art as the rest of 

 the community who have been thrown upon their own labour for 

 the means of making their bread. Even in politics, where eldest 

 sons long enjoyed a precedence that might easily have proved 

 exclusive, younger sons and men of no family at all have more 

 than equalled them in the attainment of great eminence ; and it is 

 no absurd opinion that England would have produced a larger 

 number of really illustrious men, if she had abandoned primo- 

 geniture long ago. Were the inheritance of a great name and 

 fortune a security for public virtue, we should expect to find the 

 standard highest in the most exalted order of our nobility ; 

 whereas it is too notorious to need specific demonstration that an 

 exceptional indifference to such motives has of late been mani- 

 fested by persons of ducal rank. No doubt these are exceptions, 

 but they are by no means rare exceptions. They are exceptions, 

 moreover, of which primogeniture must bear the whole discredit, 

 for they are the direct result of settling princely territories upon 

 unborn heirs, of whose capacity and character there is not the 

 smallest presumption. On the other hand, the whole credit of 

 instances, happily more numerous, in which a noble estate is 

 nobly administered, cannot fairly be assigned to primogeniture. 

 Before we can be assured that society is a clear gainer by the 

 existence of a great landowner, combining every perfection of his 

 type, we must be satisfied that he does more good than all the 

 yeomen whom he displaces, and more than he would have done 

 himself if compelled to win his own position in the world, perhaps 

 struggling, like Warren Hastings, for the redemption of a lost 

 patrimony. 



Indeed, the merits so freely claimed for primogeniture from 

 this point of view, only appear irresistible so long as we leave out 

 of sight those which may be claimed for the alternative. When, 

 for instance, it is urged that no incentive to honourable ambition 



