an outcast. He was hard pressed by the competition of large farmers; he was eaten up by game which he dared not destroy; harassed, worried, threatened with lawsuits by the squire's agent, tempted by the high price offered for his land, or attracted to the town by the rapid fortunes which he saw made there every day—all these influences working together were too strong for him, and he parted with his land; his hedges were cut down, and where his dwelling had stood stretched the silent expanse of some great park.

The whole latter part of the eighteenth century witnessed the decadence of the agricultural middle class; Waterloo completed their destruction. The French wars had given temporary support to the yeomen; farm produce during that period commanded extreme prices; but this very fact encouraged land-owners to incur expenses, to enlarge their mode of living, and to borrow money for the improvement of their estates. The fall in prices which followed the peace, aggravated as it was by the abolition of the forced currency, took the greater part of the yeomen unawares; they found themselves hopelessly involved, and sold their land to satisfy their creditors. They may be said to have reached their lowest point of depression during the last years of George III. The social element, which in the middle ages had formed the bone and sinew of the State-the rural middle class-had become extinct.

up

Three statistical results suffice to illustrate and sum this agrarian revolution. At the very time at which I am writing, 10,207 indiuals own two-thirds of England and Wales, 33 individuals own two-thirds

of Scotland, and 1,942 individuals own two-thirds of Ireland.1

1 See Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords, Part ii. chap. 3. It is not possible to trace the progress of this agrarian revolution year by year, but it is not without interest to ascertain accurately its final result, from which certain consequences have followed. At the end of the last century, according to the generally received calculation, the number of land-owners in England and Wales was 200,000; in 1861 a return, carelessly compiled and hastily interpreted, gave support to the statement that the number of landed proprietors had fallen from 200,000 to about 30,000. The last estimate was contested, and in the absence of the information necessary to decide the point both sides applied to the Government to order a fresh inquiry. The result was made known in 1875. If we take the gross figures, we find that the soil of England and Wales, exclusive of London, was divided amongst 972,836 land-owners. The total, nearly a million, was considerable, and would lead us to suppose that, far from having undergone a process of concentration since the beginning of the century, landed property had to a very great extent been divided and parcelled out. A more careful analysis shows us that this conclusion cannot be justified.

It was observed, in the first place, that of the whole number of proprietors, 270,000 only, in round numbers, owned more than one acre, and that among them were divided 32,862,343 acres, being almost the whole of the 33,013,514 acres returned. Only 151,000 acres remained to be divided amongst the remaining 700,000 land-owners, that is to say, they held on an average about two-tenths of an acre apiece. It seemed clear that plots so diminutive were not agricultural holdings, and all doubt was dispelled when it was shown by calculation that each acre of land classed under this heading returned an average rent of £200, while the average rent of land in general was £2 per acre. The small owners included in this category evidently consisted not of rural proprietors but of owners of plots in the towns or suburbs let at a high rental. All towns except London were, as a matter of fact, included in the return. There are various reasons why a similar

If we

deduction should be made from the 122,000 proprietors of from one to ten acres ; they held among them only 478,679 acres, being less than four acres apiece. A large proportion of these plots of from one to ten acres were evidently devoted to commercial purposes, to warehouses, gardens, pleasure-grounds, &c., and were without any agricultural or rural character whatever. In addition to this their comparative annual values disclosed the semi-urban character of these estates. Their total rental, their quantity being less than 500,000 acres, was greater than the rental of the 3,317,000 acres― -unquestionably rural in character—which made up the properties ranging from 500 to 1,000 acres. consider that the corporations and their estates ought also to be excluded, and if the necessary deduction is made in respect of estates returned in more than one category, and in respect of long leaseholders improperly returned as freeholders, we arrive at a result which gives us no more than 150,000 owners spread over an area equal to rather less than a third of France (the actual figures being 57,917 square miles as against 203,866), and forming part of a population equal to 70 per cent. of the population of France (the actual numbers being 26,000,000 as against 37,000,000). We have, therefore, in England one rural landowner for (roughly speaking) each third of a square mile and for every 112 inhabitants. It is difficult to ascertain whether since 1830 the relative proportion of the rural proprietors to the whole population has declined or increased: it is however impossible that any considerable change can have taken place since that date, and we may in any case take it as established that between the end of the sixteenth century and the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, the proportion had fallen in the ratio of six

to one.

II

THE CIVIL, FISCAL, AND ECONOMIC PRIVILEGES OF THE LANDED GENTRY

WE can now picture to ourselves an oligarchy of landlords who had divided the country between them. There lies before us an unbroken succession of great estates, with no small freehold to mar its continuity, and scattered here and there, like islands in a sea, a few towns where all that was left of population and wealth showed a growing tendency to concentrate. The gentry, as was natural, showed great anxiety to preserve these latifundia—the source of their wealth and the foundation of their influence-in the continuous possession of the same families by transmitting them undivided from generation to generation through a succession of sole owners. Real estate was indeed, under the common law, subject to the rules of primogeniture in cases of intestate succession; but the owner of real estate possessed both freedom of alienation inter vivos and, subject to a partial restriction which was before long removed,1 the right of testamentary disposition. As

1 In 1660. By Stat. 12 Car II., c. 14.

the law stood at the beginning of the seventeenth century a family estate was liable to a continual risk of subdivision; the shortcomings of the law in this respect were however made good by the system of family arrangements known under the name of "settlements." During the Civil War the ingenuity of Orlando Bridgeman, evolved this contrivance in its full perfection; it was adopted in the interest of their class by all the land-owning families, and from that time forward the custom has been adhered to with singular tenacity. By the terms of these "settlements the successor to an estate surrendered beforehand the full ownership which would one day accrue to him; he accepted thenceforth the position of a mere tenant for life in relation to his eldest son, who, as a matter of fact, might be still unborn, and by so doing surrendered the right of devising, selling, mortgaging, or even leasing for any longer time than his own life, the estate which he was compelled to hand on intact and unencumbered to the remainderman. This splitting up of the rights of ownership rendered it almost impossible for the proprietor of a settled estate to alienate it, or for his creditors to seize it. It is true that the remainderman, when the previous interests had fallen in, enjoyed the rights of ownership to their full extent and could make a valid disposition of the property. Precautions were however taken to prevent this. The expectant owner had, during the lifetime of the tenant for life, no claim to any part of the income, and when he was of an age to need a provision, more especially at the time of his marriage, temptations were placed in his way. He was