PAYMENT IN POSITION.
IN the interesting and instructive book which he has just published, " The Story of a Great Estate" (Murray), the Duke of Bedford incidentally discusses the question whether a great landlord who gets nothing out of his estate gets at all repaid in position. Naturally the Duke, being a Duke of a historic family, with a position wholly independent of his acreage, is more than half disposed to answer in the negative, and to contend that, except in the opportunity it affords of wise and continuous benevolence, a great estate produces no kind of personal gratification. The "position," in short, only means an additional chance or certainty of being shot at with verbal pellets by popular journalists and mob orators. That seems to be a very general opinion just now, to judge from the number of historic estates in the market ; but we suspect that it is an unsound one, and it may be worth while in a day when the rich are shirking temporary poverty with a certain want of fortitude to say why. A recent writer has declared that one grand motive-power of the social organisation in all countries is the desire of " consideration " —a very good explanatory word—and no one who knows how
strong the feeling is, and how far down it filters into the thick strata of the respectable classes, will doubt that the axiom is sound. We should say with him that the desire to be respected was the most active of all the less spiritual motive-powers, that it was, in practice, among the strongest restraints upon aberrant conduct, and that although the upper class are most conscious of it, its influence is most powerful very near the bottom. To "fall," to be cl4classe, to cease, in fact, to be respected, is to the worthy family with £200 a year the most unendurable of misfortunes. Nor is the feeling decaying; rather, we should say, it increases to an un- healthy degree. It is the root of half the struggling and self- advertisement which we see everywhere around us. The social contest looks for the moment like a struggle for money only ; but that is because almost all other forms of power have been gradually whittled away, and the claim of birth being only half acknowledged, money becomes the only easily obtained source of consideration. To be Rothschild and to be despised would gratify no man except the indurated cynic who at heart dislikes, even more than he despises, mankind. The struggle is, in fact, to be respected as the struggling one understands respect—he is often, no doubt, an ass who mistakes open-eyed staring for evidence of respect—and it is
with this object that he exhibits money and brings on himself the reproach, sometimes the unjust reproach, of vulgar ostentation. We note that a Due d'Aumale may do a good many purely showy things which a new South African or Westralian millionaire is heartily abused for doing. Now, in the higher classes there is no source of consideration, except perhaps high rank, which can compare with the possession of a large estate. It implies large wealth to begin with, for though the Doke of Bedford explains with irresistible statistics that the possession of an estate like Thorney (nineteen thousand acres) leaves him nothing to spend on himself, it leaves him a considerable sum to spend on other people, and a much larger sum of which he is the final and irresponsible distributor. He can " make " or ruin half the trading artisans within a radius of miles, and power of that sort is quite as much a source of consideration as power to keep racehorses or give magnificent dinners. Then, though he says Thorney is unsaleable, it would, we fancy, if sold, realise a very considerable sum, and this not from any "syndicate of speculators," as he fears, but from the tenants themselves, who, though they would not give twenty years' purchase, would give twelve for the dignity and comfort of freeholdership. If the Duke seriously doubts that, let him offer to lend them the money on mortgage at 4 per cent. The feudal feeling, moreover, the liking to follow the great landlord in politics as in other things, the disposi- tion to defer to him if he is even decently well liked, the desire to be well regarded by him as the most unmistakable cachet of social consideration, is by no means so dead as it is a custom to assert, and it tends to keep up the position even of a Duke. The feeling is strongest, no doubt, towards a landlord of old family ; but even the new man benefits by it, and in this country, where pedigrees are forgotten, newness ends very rapidly,—certainly after two generations. We think, therefore, that, provided the landlord has other revenues to live upon, the position conferred by the ownership even of an estate like Thorney, which yields annually no surplus money whatever, is fair compensa- tion for the trouble and disappointment, and sometimes even obloquy, it entails. Those are the usual penalties of ruling, and among the occupations open to a benevolent man ruling is perhaps the pleasantest. There are men who do not like it, who fret under the responsibility, or who are conscious of jar when they are thrown into that par- ticular kind of contact with their fellow-men, but we speak for the majority. England would be owned with pleasure by the rich even if owning it yielded nothing, because out of the ownership came large payment in position.
It may be said, and indeed is said every day, that the advantages of position are every day decaying, that demo- cracy will ultimately heap all the expenses of the State upon the landlords, and that it is well for the owners of great estates to sell them before a worse day comes round. Those who use this argument are very numerous, and very sagacious, and very strongly convinced, but still their view is in the nature of a prophecy, and we venture to doubt whether it will come true. As regards taxation it certainly will not. Democrats may be mistaken as to the best social organists-
tion, but they are not fools, and they certainly will not lay taxes upon land which yields comparatively nothing, and exempt other constituents of wealth which yield a great deal. They want a full Treasury, not a quantity of land thrown upon their hands which they can neither sell nor manage. A good many of them in this country are pene- trated with Mill's ideas ; but Mill, if he had had in our day to rearrange taxation, would have modified those ideas very considerably. When it is once understood that the possession of land does not mean the possession of revenue, the burden of ownership will be decidedly diminished, while the advan- tage of the position will be swelled every year by two factors, —the enormous increase in the numbers of the wealthy, among whom the great landlords will always stand out as the most visible of the important, and the immense extension .all over the world of the English-speaking peoples. To be somebody among a hundred millions of men is much more than to be somebody among five millions; and a great Eng- lish landlord, especially if he has a historic house on his domain, will always be so much of a somebody as a man who has not individualised himself in action or literature or art or science can hope to be. The owner of Woburn fifty years hence will be twice as conspicuous as he is now, to twice as many people whose average of spendable money will be twice as high. There is a future for an old landed estate, and there is none for a block of Consols. The position of its owner tends to rise, not to fall, and will become more valuable, as everything of which the supply is not unlimited becomes more valuable. England must one day become, as we predicted nearly thirty years ago it would become, the evening home, the place of rest of the English-speaking race, which will dominate the world, and even supposing that wheat never rises in price, the choice bits of England, that is, practically the great estates, will be the subjects of almost unlimited competition The fact that their possession will not pay does not signify a straw. How much do the Vanderbilt diamonds pay, or the treasures hidden up in Hertford House? Sir Richard Wallace sacrificed £40,000 a year to keep his treasures together, and the Vanderbilt of the future will sacrifice £40,000 a year to be owner of a Chatsworth, to be the unquestioned first man in a great district, to be, if not the receiver of any pecuniary advantage, the distributor of advantages to every one within a radius of miles, the dis- tributor whose favour entails neither envy nor humiliation. The position will compensate him alike for outlay and for trouble, just as the view and the air and the quiet compensate -the citizen for the cost and the worry of his country house. The man who sells an old estate will certainly be relieved of .trouble, as will also the King who abdicates, and may for the moment considerably increase his supply of spending money ; .but he will find he has lost what the majority of the thought- ful consider the thing which among material things is the best worth having, the easy dignity of the great country gentleman. The position worthless? Why the Duke of Bed- ford's very steward who manages his cottages is the Pro- vidence of seven hundred and sixty-eight separate households, to him, at least, as visible and as interesting as the farmers are to his lord.
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