I THE CONCENTRATION OF ESTATES- THE first point which strikes us is the phenomenon of an aristocracy open to all and liberal in its tendencies, which becomes in the end a tyrannical oligarchy. In 1660, on the return of Charles II., the gentry, as was only to be expected, were reinstated, and their position made secure by statutes and measures of rehabilitation. The events of 1688 were in no sense a reaction against this outcome of the Restoration. The revolution which placed William III. upon the throne had not the depth of a movement which was social and popular, or even national, in the widest sense of the word. It was the work not even of the country aristocracy as a body, but of a coalition of great nobles moved by private interest or alarmed for their personal safety. This body of conspirators, fortunately for themselves, found in their legitimate prince a man gifted in a peculiar degree with a faculty for betraying his own cause, in the monarch whom they set up a man of transcendent abilities, and in the nation at large the indifference and the weary disappointment which succeed a protracted struggle. The middle and lower classes had expected nothing from a change which came upon them almost by surprise; they could reap no advantage from it. The social, political, and administrative preponderance enjoyed previously to 1640 by the rural gentry remained intact after 1688. From this period, on the contrary, dates the rapid development of a great change in a direction favourable to the aristocracy, a change which the upper classes had long contemplated and striven for. The gentry had absorbed two centuries before what remained of the old nobility, and had formed themselves into a single non-exclusive upper class which rested on, and was continually being recruited from, a numerous and rising middle class the small landowners. The higher class, by a gradual process of contraction and self-isolation, cast off its weaker elements and those connecting it with the class below it, and finally grew into that haughty aristocracy which withstood the French Revolution. This social and political change was due to an agrarian revolution. Two facts sum up the position: the agricultural middle class disappeared; the monopoly of land became stricter and more oppressive. The social arrangement to which England in the middle ages owed her superiority was reversed. We are again confronted with a historical paradox. We are wont to regard it as a law of history that every aristocracy which has begun to lose its original shape and consistency knows no pause in its process of change, but tends, without ceasing, to sink into democracy. England supplies the rare example, so opposed to our ordinary experience, of a nation imbued to a certain extent with the spirit of democracy, but which has for the time reproduced—or permitted the reproduction of—an oligarchy. Two causes combined to hasten this metamorphosis : the preponderance of the House of Commons, established between 1700 and 1750, and the great mechanical inventions of the end of the eighteenth century. Both causes stimulated the attacks directed against the yeomen; the second of the two diminished the vigour and obstinacy of their resistance. In Walpole's time men looked upon Parliament as the practical seat of power; the House of Commons attempted, if not to make or unmake ministries, at least to force the hands of ministers and to call them to account for their conduct; it had an indirect voice in the disposal of places and honours. The Septennial Act, passed in 1716, rendered Parliament less dependent on public opinion and better able to pursue uninterruptedly a more consistent and effective policy and a more continuous line of action. The House was fast becoming the basis of Government, and to gain the control of it was a natural object of ambition. To do this it was necessary to manipulate the constituencies, to exclude, so far as was possible, independent electors, and to admit those only who could be coerced or bribed without difficulty. The great Whig and Tory lords, royalist squires, Indian nabobs, men who had made their fortunes by commerce or manufactures, vied with each other in prosecuting the work of dispossession.1 They set themselves to wrest 1 The statute of 1711, which made the possession of a considerable landed estate a necessary qualification for a seat in the his estate from the hands of the small freeholder, and to compel him to migrate to the towns or the colonies. In 1727 Lawrence, in a handbook for the use of stewards, counselled the model steward to keep a sharp eye on the estate lying next that of his lord, and to use his best endeavours to induce the small freeholders to sell.1 We have here the evidence of a deliberate plan of expropriation; we have also a proof that the buying up of the small estates had not so far made any great progress. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century the object in view, which up to that time had been pursued with more or less want of energy, began to offer greater attractions, the temptation grew stronger, the efforts made more systematic and more effectual. Between 1750 and 1780 the great manufacturing industries had come into existence, and were attracting to the towns vast populations whose sustenance had to be provided for. The production of the food necessary to supply their wants promised to be an operation involving considerable profits. The rural gentry foresaw, or reckoned on, the higher returns which they would obtain by the application to large areas of improved methods of agriculture, and by the employment of increased capital. They betook themselves with redoubled energy to the task of seizing upon and appropriating the soil, and again they were assisted by the industrial revolution which completed the discomfiture of the class which was the object of their attacks. Almost down to 1760 House of Commons, emphasized and strengthened the tendency of the time. 1 Lawrence's Duty of a Steward (1727), p. 36. |