MAMMOTH SQUIRES. T HE sort of surprise with which the account
of Prince John Schwarzenberg, his immense domain, his great fortune, twelve millions, and his life as an active landowner, has been read in this country, points to a curious change in European society. The great nobles who are landlords and nothing else are shrinking back into comparative obscurity. No one any longer describes them or their magnificence. The interest taken in the new millionaires increases every year; they are watched like Princes, and their movements, whims, and speculations recorded as if they were statesmen—though, by-the-way, you seldom hear anything of the individual character of Crcesus—but the great landlords are entirely overlooked. The majority of Englishmen are, we suspect, hardly aware that everywhere in Europe except France, and in Spanish America, there are a few landlords whose incomes, derived from estates alone, rival those of the trading magnates, who live in palaces which are often museums of art and centres of a large social life, and who reign in a most direct kind of way over great areas of territory and thousands of dependants. They are aware that a few such men still exist in England, though shrinking yearly in importance ; but they hardly know that in Germany and Austria, Italy and Spain, there are still numerous families of vast landed wealth looked up to by whole provinces as a kind of Princes, and exercising an influence which in their localities is almost irresistible. Many of them, no doubt, seek the livelier life of the capitals, and are known only as aristocrats, men exhausting great resources in the search for pleasure and excitement; and a few more throw themselves into politics and are lost among the statesmen of the second rank—hardly any first-class landowner, except Lord Hartington, has in recent years been well in the front of politics—but there are still many who reside on their estates and make it the business of their lives to administer or improve them. Their amusement, in fact, is to govern. In Germany and Austria, indeed, they have of late years been most active, seeking money sedulously in what they think the modern way, setting up factories, introducing new cultures, importing new breeds of beasts, and even trying to found banks or establish great export trades in timber, fruit, or wine. They do not, we fancy, often succeed, for though they have the millionaire's first faculty, that of commanding men in great numbers, they lack his second, that of compelling all whom they command to bring in profit for them. They trust their agents, intendants, and managers far too much, and are often plundered in a way which, but for the solidity of their fortunes, and their reluctance to part with their estates outright, would speedily bring them to ruin. They survive, it being the class just below them which becomes embarrassed, is bought out by new men, and passes silently away; but they are losing their great position, and sinking froni nobles into mammoth squires. Their power, in fact, except in so far as it is derived from possessions, is passing away. The Govern- ments rarely now use them as Ministers, preferring men less independent of success ; they do not sway Parliaments ; and they rarely become the favourites of the people. They no longer raise military forces; their direct and legal authority, except in places like Mecklenburg, has been taken away from them, and they rarely, except in Italy, seek the great posts in Government service. They tend, in fact, towards a seclusion which protects them, but deprives them of weight in the community, and they become, as we have said, mammoth
squires, of the last importance to their estates, but scarcely noticed by the body of the people. Even in
England, where publicity is becoming a disease, the great country nobles are, of all men, seldomest noticed in the newspapers, and unless they hold Irish estates or city properties, the policy of men like the Dukes of Northum- b3rland or Buccleuch, or Sir W. W. Wynn or Sir T:Acland, on their own estates scarcely ever receives a word of comments The same is the case on the Continent, and of all who spoke of "the Schwarzenberg realm," not 1 per cent. knew or cared to know- the history of its management. The class, in fact, which but fifty years ago was the really great class of Europe, and is even• now probably the richest., the great millionaires being very few, is settling down into a kind of obscurity like that of the cultivated rich in the American Union. Their numbers are never recruited, for the new men, though they buy land, do not buy it anywhere in- counties ; the laws of inheritance usual on the Continent operate terribly against them ; they suffer more from spendthrifts than the new houses, partly because their magnificence is more dangerous, because it must be sustained by borrowed money, and partly because their heirs are less fettered, when boys, by fear of parental disfavour ; and they grow, we imagine, weaker than their rivals, who, it must be remembered, are all of them as a class within a generation or two of founders who must have had exceptional faculty for accumulation.
The class, we suspect, will perish, though slowly, and not from poverty so much as from other causes. They probably will remain rich in money, for they are taking enormous pains to keep their resources together ; they make on the Continent great sacrifices to avoid division ; and they enjoy a natural but most pronounced preference in the eyes of the heiresses who now-appear so often, and who will become with the change in the position of civilised women so much more numerous. It is not only American girls who enrich the great families, but Jewesses, and the daughters of the trading kings of every description. The wealth will stay for a time, but the interest of the old ruling position dies away. Really to reign on a great estate requires energy like that of the Emperor William, who works like a contractor with his fortune made but not solid, or a barrister who at forty- seven sees the ball at his feet ; and to make such work exciting, power is required, and power is dying away, killed by the change in laws, by the democratic sentiment, and by the looseness with which the rural classes now sit to the soil. The disfavour of the great man once meant ruin; but what is the attraction of vast ownership, when you can hardly dismiss a tenant, and the expression of a landlord's wish is rather a reason for resistance than sub- mission? The desire to keep together these vast properties will end, even if democratic taxation does not extinguish them in a more summary way, the great man feeling happier with his park and his income than with unpro- ductive rights over districts he scarcely can visit or see. The diplomatic Schwarzenberg, the man who made the wonderful mot, " You can do anything with bayonets except sit on them," did not, we have been told in Vienna, accurately know where some of the family estates were situated. Other interests will draw the great landowners from their old work ; and as the class dwindles, one wonders if any other will take its place. We incline to think not, during any time it is worth while to speculate about. As a matter of fact, the new men do not assume the old position—(name anywhere one, except in the Scotch Highlands, who, has done so P)—and it is not to be wondered at. Local leadership in support of the dominant crowd, the all-puissant " People," hardly gives significance, and local leadership against it is becoming impossible. What can a Radziwill in Germany, or a Swarzenberg in Austria, or a Massimo in Italy, or a d'Ossnna in Spain, do against the concrete and visible government of officials, or the impalpable, invisible, but crashing govern- ment of opinion ? Local ambition, therefore, dies, and the sense of local strength. Men talk in all countries of decentralisation as an object, but democracy is essentially a centralising power, and when it speaks either through a representative body or a Caesar, the breath of its mouth is not to be resisted, though it may be silently scorned. Men will not escape from their perennial hunger to be governed and led, any more than any other gregarious animals will ; but neither government nor leadership will come from local sources. When the present magnates pass away, there will be no more of the same kind, or of any kind in the least like unto them. If a local force grows up, which is quite possible, for there are many segregating tendencies abroad, and an idea afloat that even a village could do much for itself if it had but law-making power, the magnate will be either the man who can sway with much persuasion and many . concessions to foolishness an 'elected council, or else a bureaucratic delegate from the central bureaucracy, who will really rule, but be himself, like a reigning Commissioner in India, only a passing shadow. We do not know • that the change will be bad ; we are not discussing that; but it will involve all Europe in a silent social revolution, and profoundly affect the universal social ideal. Prince John Schwarzenberg, as described in the Timer, is, we suppose, a nuisance, as is a tree on corn-land ; but, like the tree, he supplies a fixed point in the landscape, where without it all is indefinite, and, to the eye, apparently in movement.
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