principal endowments of every religious foundation are fiefs held under
a feudal contract of service. More successful, though not less
difficult, was the struggle against the theory that the parish-priest is
the vassal of his patron and may, by recognising his obligations as a
vassal, acquire the vassal's privilege of passing on his office to his
son.

Such then was feudalism in the concrete. It is the negation of all that
we hold to be most important in the conceptions of the state and
citizenship. In effect, though not altogether in theory, it subordinates
the obligations of the citizen to those which the individual incurs by
entering on a voluntary contract. This contract may or may not be made
with the ruler of the state; in the majority of cases it is made with a
fellow-citizen. Though honourable, according to current ideas, this
contract always leaves to the lord some loopholes for the exercise of
arbitrary and capricious authority; it impairs, if it does not destroy,
the rule of law. Again, the effect of the system is to throw the main
burden of national defence, and the main control of the royal power,
upon a close hereditary caste of landowners. The standard of public duty
is lowered; the government becomes either an absolutism or an oligarchy,
and in either case studies chiefly the interests of a class which
despises industry and holds privilege to be the necessary basis of
society. Under feudalism the powers of the Crown, executive, judicial,
administrative, are often granted away to be held by the same tenure as
the fiefs over which they are exercised. And thus is created the worst
form of civil service that we can conceive; a corps of hereditary
officials, who can only be checked or removed with extreme difficulty,
who render no account of the sums which they collect under the name of
fines or dues, who are seldom educated to the point of realising that,
even in their private interest, honesty is the best policy. If this