THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 409 



rural neighbourhoods what they were in olden times. The peculiar 

 agricultural system of England would remain intact, with its three- 

 fold division of labour between the landlord charged with the 

 public duties attaching to property, the farmer contributing most 

 of the capital and all the skill, and the labourer relieved by the 

 assurance of continuous wages from all risks except that of ill- 

 ness. But the landlords would be a larger body, containing fewer 

 grandees and more practical agriculturists, living at their country 

 homes all the year round, and putting their savings into land, 

 instead of wasting them in the social competition of the metrop- 

 olis. The majority of them would still be eldest sons, many of 

 whom, however, would have learned to work hard till middle life, 

 for the support of their families ; and besides these, there would 

 be not a few younger sons who had retired to pass the evening 

 of their days on little properties near the place of their birth, 

 either left them by will or bought out of their own acquisitions. 

 With these would be mingled other elements in far larger 

 measure and greater variety than at present wealthy capitalists 

 eager to enter the ranks of the landed gentry, merchants, traders, 

 and professional men content with a country villa and a hundred 

 freehold acres around it, yeoman-farmers, and even labourers of 

 rare intelligence, who had seized favourable chances of investing 

 in land. Under such conditions, it is not too much to expect 

 that some links, now missing, between rich and poor, gentle and 

 simple, might be supplied in country districts ; that " plain liv- 

 ing and high thinking " might again find a home in some of 

 our ancient manor houses ; that with less of dependence and 

 subordination to a dominant will there would be more of true 

 neighbourly feeling, and even of clanship ; and that posterity, 

 reaping the beneficent fruits of greater social equality, would 

 marvel, and not without cause, how the main obstacle to greater 

 social equality the law and custom of primogeniture escaped 

 revision for more than two centuries after the final abolition of 

 feudal tenures. 



