takably, the drift of public sentiment. The Catholic hierarchy were, of course, aroused, indignant, disgusted; but can any thing more plainly show that they are impotent before the will of the people? The positions, also, which this Protestant majority in the French Cabinet hold are noteworthy. M. Waddington is Minister of Foreign Affairs; General Borel is Minister of War; Admiral Pothuau is Minister of the Marine; M. Léon Say is Minister of the Finances; and M. De Freycinet is Minister of Public Works.

The principles of liberty and constitutional government are firmly rooted in Western and Central Europe, and they are spreading in all directions. Austria and Russia are feeling their force, the Ottoman Empire is crumbling before them, and their march is triumphantly onward. It is a progress which no human power can stop. What has already been accomplished among some of the leading Continental Powers, in adopting constitutional government, is quite a recent work. It is but twenty-eight years since Prussia, the leading state of United Germany, adopted a Constitution; while Austria took the first step in this direction a little more than ten years ago. Under the liberal spirit and policy of the Emperor Alexander, Russia, the last of the European Powers to maintain Absolutism, will soon follow suit, and the power of the People will thenceforth be everywhere recognized.

It is scarcely to be believed that the opposite forces, already weakened and trembling, can long hold even their present sway in France. Spiritual Absolutism need not, however, be expected to make concessions. To do this is to disembowel itself. It will stand in its tracks and perish in the ditch. This is history; this is prophecy; and prophecy will again become history. It is but a question of time, possibly of months, possibly of years; and it may be that it was settled for France last October; or, if not, that it will be decided and forever settled when President MacMahon's term shall expire-two years hence. But its final settlement is undoubtedly near at hand. When it shall come it will be against Absolutism in both church and state, and in favor of the People. May God speed the day!

ROBERT L. STANTON.

THE COST OF A LANDED GENTRY.

N 1869 the British Government obtained and published an elaborate report upon the tenure of land in the United States. We were informed that "the system of land occupation in the United States of America may be generally described as by small proprietors;" that "the proprietary class throughout the country is on the increase;" that "the theory and practice of the country is for every man to own land as soon as possible;" that "the American people are very averse to being tenants;" that land is so cheap in the sparsely peopled portions of the country that every provident man may own land in fee;" that "the possession of land of itself does not bestow on a man, as it does in Europe, a title to consideration;" that "absolute titles to land are easily and quickly acquired ;" and that while in the United States the landowner "has entire freedom to devise his property at will, in the event of his dying intestate his real estate is equally divided among his children, without distinction as to sex, subject, however, to a right of dower to his widow should there be one." We further learned that tenancy of agricultural land was not only rare, but was also much restricted; that, for example, in the State of California, "no lease of agricultural land can be for a longer term than ten years;" that, by the constitution of the State of New York, adopted in 1846, it is declared that "no lease or grant of agricultural land for a longer period than twelve years, in which shall be reserved any rent or service of any kind, shall be valid ;" that Michigan in 1850 adopted the same term; that in many States, in regard to rent, the law confers no privileges upon the landlord above other creditors;" that in the United States "the sale and transfer of

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land are conducted with about the same ease as would be the sale of a watch," and that "very large quantities of land are seldom held undivided by one family for more than one or two generations"—a fact of which an illustration was given "in the case of the Livingston family, whose noble domain in the State of New York, embracing upwards of 160,000 acres, and which was granted to them under patent of the Crown, by the colonial governor, was divided in 1790 by the third and last landlord of the manor, he being imbued by the progress of advancing ideas and the changing character of American institutions."''

The phrase with which "his Majesty's representative" concluded the above quotation is not well composed, but it may be taken to indicate that which I believe to be truth: that the institutions of the United States and the feeling of the American people are opposed to the establishment of a landed gentry. We may not say that never in the future history of the United States will there be a landed gentry possessing a great part of the agricultural land, and, together with it, large power and influence, but we may certainly affirm that such an institution cannot be indigenous as in England. We can fancy a time, and that not very remote, in which the Homestead Law of 1862 may be placed among the curiosities of American legislation, when there will be no "unappropriated territory of the United States'' on which new settlers can be placed, when the current rate of interest on capital will have declined to an equality with that which is general in England, when all the present conditions of landowning will be changed, when the ambition of many of the wealthiest citizens of the United States will tend towards the acquirement of land. But economic considerations we may be quite sure will never in the United States be put out of sight as they have been in England in deference to the landed gentry, because of the radical difference in the foundation of the two communities. The English nation was founded at a time when the idea upon which what we call the origin of society is based -the rule of the family-governed the world; that idea has survived in England. The American community has been

'Part I. Reports from H. M. Representatives respecting the Tenure of Land in the several Countries of Europe (sic), 1869.

formed upon quite a different model. Among all the great contributories to the formation of the English people, the elementary group was the Family. The Family, House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type. Sir Henry Maine's researches in "Ancient Law" may well be referred to upon this point. He says: "The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. The history of political ideas begins in fact with the assumption that kinship in blood is the sole possible ground of community in political functions; nor is there any of those subversions of feeling which we term emphatically revolutions so startling and so complete as the change which is accomplished when some other principle-such as that, for instance, of local contiguity— establishes itself for the first time as the basis of common political action.”

I wish, in the first place, to maintain that English society was founded and is still vastly influenced, if not altogether ruled, by the ancient idea; and that the United States differ essentially in that they were founded and are altogether governed upon the modern idea of a community. To make this more clear, we cannot do better than follow a little further the lucid argument of Sir Henry Maine. "The idea that a number of persons should exercise political rights in common simply because they happened to live within the same topographical limits was utterly strange and monstrous to primitive antiquity." "They recruited themselves by factitious extensions of consanguinity." They became Aristocracies when " a fresh population from any cause collected around them which could put in no claim to community of origin." Perhaps one of the closest survivals of the Patria Potestas of the Romans which endures in our time is the Royal Family of England, with of course the signal difference of feminine headship. With the Romans the maxim "Mulier est finis familia❞—a woman is the terminus of the family-prevailed, and so it does in this day among the British landed gentry. The history of civilization is distinguished by the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth in its place of individual obligation. As Sir Henry Maine puts it,

"The Individual is steadily substituted for the Family as the unit of which civil laws take account." Admitting that society in the United States was based and is formed upon the Individual as the unit, I shall contend that there is a substantial difference yet discernible in English society, and that this is largely due to the survival of the ancient idea as represented, with much cost to the people, by the landed gentry.

In feudal times primogeniture became the concentrated form of authority in which the family appeared, and the practice is adhered to in Great Britain with marvellous fidelity. In the new Domesday Books, published at the instance of the fifteenth Earl of Derby by the Government of which till lately he was a distinguished member, we find 525 nobles, composing, with a few exceptions, the Upper Chamber of the Legislature, and all of them adhering in their families to the practices of feudalismreturned as owners of one fifth of the area of the United Kingdom. They have each, on an average, three landed estates. The number in the several grades of nobility, the number, acreage, and annual value of their estates, are set out in the following table:

Below the nobles in rank, but superior in number and hardly inferior in possessions and local influence, are the lesser landed gentry, who, together with the nobility, are owners of about four fifths of the soil of the United Kingdom. Owing to manifold errors in the official compilation, it is not very easy to form a precise estimate of their number. But these new Domesday Books afford at least a good basis for calculation, and from those books I have compiled the following, figures, which show the