slipped through the fingers of the spendthrift courtiers to whom they
were at first granted, small freeholders were very numerous in the
South, and these men like the middle class in the towns, being strong
Protestants, went with the Parliament against the Laudian reaction in
religion. But land in the hands of great proprietors is Conservative,
especially when it is held under entails and connected with hereditary
nobility; and into the hands of great proprietors the land of England
has now entirely passed. The last remnant of the old yeomen freeholders
departed in the Cumberland Statesmen, and the yeoman freeholder in
England is now about as rare as the other. Commerce has itself assisted
the process by giving birth to great fortunes, the owners of which are
led by social ambition to buy landed estates, because to land the odour
of feudal superiority still clings, and it is almost the necessary
qualification for a title. The land has also actually absorbed a large
portion of the wealth produced by manufactures, and by the general
development of industry; the estates of Northern landowners especially
have enormously increased in value, through the increase of population,
not to mention the not inconsiderable appropriation of commercial wealth
by marriage. Thus the Conservative element retains its predominance, and
it even seems as though the land of Milton, Vane, Cromwell, and the
Reformers of 1832, might after all become, politically as well as
territorially, the domain of a vast aristocracy of landowners, and the
most reactionary instead of the most progressive country in Europe.

Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of
interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the
North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has
taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and
learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than
willing to enter the privileged circle. This junction is at present the