As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.
In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen's Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror. As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new régime has involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres. Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be unlet; his sons' bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the old Hall at his 'rent dinner,' the squire, one of a long race of squires, has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton, Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since Lord Cairns' Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new proprietors violates few of the old traditions.