beneficial-in the religions and sciences evolved by the older races in the past, so we shall retain whatever is true or good in the present religious and ethical systems, and shall reject that which is evil. Probably the race which follows ours as the dominant race will receive by heredity much of what is good in our science. Perhaps we may be now inheriting the good from the older races from which our race was evolved, and rejecting what is injurious or false in these older sciences. If this is so there is no cause for grief at the decay of ancient institutions, rather should we rejoice that the untrue, the meretricious, the vicious, will be swept away and that the good, the true, and the beautiful, will remain with us to be handed on to our successors.

CHAPTER VIII

OUR GOVERNING CLASSES

THE FEUDALISING OF ENGLAND

THE Conquest of England by the Normans completed the subordination of the Anglo-Saxon to the Latin. William divided the lands of England into baronies and conferred them on the knights and other adventurers who had assisted him in robbing the kingdom. The whole kingdom, we are told, contained about 700 chief tenants, and 60,213 knights' fees, and as none of the native English were admitted into the first rank, the few who retained their landed property were glad to be received into the second. . . . The small mixture of English who entered into this civil or military fabric (for it partook of both species) was SO restrained by subordination under the foreigners, that the Norman dominion seemed fixed on the most durable basis, and to defy all the efforts of its enemies. How durable it has been can only be determined by a fair estimate of the strength of the feudal remains among us at the present time. But of the feudal system itself so little is known that it is impossible to speak of it, or to describe it with certainty, from the histories. We are therefore compelled to appeal to our knowledge of human nature, and to call in the aid of imagination to build up a picture of feudal times. That it was wholly Latin in its character is generally acknowledged. "Says Montesquieu: The feudal laws are a beautiful spectacle. From afar we notice an old oak standing

erect, we catch sight of its foliage, we approach and there is its stem, but the roots are hidden, and we must dig deeply into the earth before we find them. And in fact we must go back several centuries before the establishment of feudalism to find its elements and roots, some of which must be sought in Roman society, combined with elements of later growth. Certainly in the latter years of the Roman empire, the nobility had been augmented by the great officials, and the titles created by Constantine were perpetuated. The importance of large estates was then increasing and we find them engulfing the smaller ones, whilst the land-owners were acquiring absolute authority, the right of administration over their farmers and slaves."1 Many of the lords were ecclesiastics. The clergy had become feudal. It had followed society instead of directing it and had been corrupted by the attraction of wealth and power.... Neither bishops nor abbots thought more of public liberty than the nobles themselves; their sole aim was to maintain their feudal rights and to use their religious influence for the development of their territorial wealth."2 The feudal lord was master over the whole earth. The air belonged to the lord, for he claimed dues on the birth of a child "as a tribute that he owes as soon as he breathes the air. . . . The account of all the claims that weighed upon the people gives a terrible picture of the feudal régime. No despot ever imagined so many, because feudal despotism varied with the individual character of the lords, and their oppressions continued after feudalism had lost its political character." As a fact, it has not yet lost its political character, nor will it do so as long as the Anglo-Saxon retains in his code a trace of the Roman law which built up the system.

3

1 Gustave Ducourdray's "Histoire Sommaire de la Civilisation," adapted by the Rev. J. Verschoyle, M.A., ch. i., p. 9. • Ibid., p. 103.

'Ibid., p. 98.

OUR NOBLE LORDS

Before proceeding with the consideration of the feudal system it may not be amiss to devote some notice to the claims on which the so-called superiority of the nobles is based. As I have said, the Latins having no strong sense of personal responsibility have no desire to govern themselves, and throw all the responsibility of government on to whoever chooses to accept it. The race therefore divides naturally into classes, or castes, and the Roman laws were admirably designed to strengthen the rulers and to keep the lower classes in subjection. The King and the lord were necessities with the Latins and were acknowledged to be so by the masses who admitted their superiority. But the Anglo-Saxon, having inherited a strong love of freedom from his Teutonic ancestors, has a powerful desire to govern himself. He has been asserting his right to self-government from the earliest time at which his racial characteristics began to show themselves, and as these characteristics have grown and developed, he has become more and more persistent in his efforts to secure for himself what he feels to be his natural right. The King and the lord who were necessities in a Latin community have grown to be anomalies in Anglo-Saxon communities, and therefore, however valuable they may have been in early times before the Anglo-Saxon had developed his self-governing power, they are of no value now, but on the contrary are an evil, as all institutions become when they have outlived their usefulness. The Latin believed in the superiority of the lord, and therefore the claim of the lord to be superior was a valid one. The AngloSaxon admits of no such superiority, and therefore it does not exist. In the majority of the AngloSaxon communities the noble lord lord has been eliminated. In England he still retains a remnant

of his ancient prestige, although much diminished in its lustre. He is still a factor in politics, however, and his influence is exerted to maintain a superiority which he still claims. It would be interesting to know precisely on what he bases his claims to superiority. Where is the line to be drawn between the noble lord and the commoner?

THE VALUE OF TITLES OF NOBILITY

The mixture of classes in England is but little, if any, less chaotic than it is in races. Is the line to be drawn at the title? On this Robbie Burns said in 1795:

The rank is but the guinea stamp,

The man's the gowd for a' that!

This was no doubt terribly radical a hundred years ago, but we have travelled very far since Burns' time, and his statement now falls somewhat short of the truth. The guinea stamp was an official guarantee that the coin was of gold of a standard degree of fineness. The rank gives no such guarantee, and a man may be the most unprincipled scoundrel unhanged, and may yet be legally entitled to call himself noble and right honourable. As a guarantee of nobleness, therefore, the rank is valueless. But the old nobility base their claim to superiority, not so much on their rank, as on their genealogies, and therefore it is necessary to examine this claim. It has been frequently asserted that if the British Peerage had not been invigorated and purified by the constant influx of plebeian blood, the old aristocracy would have been long since extinct. Here is an example. "The vitality of the Neville tribe was sufficient to bear them through repeated marriages with the only daughters and heiresses whose wedlock so often forebodes the extinction of an ancient