Their landed proprietorship has resulted in certain radical inequalities of taxation and certain grave economic drawbacks.

Their position as a privileged class made them hospitable only to those reforms which spared their privileges.

But their privileges could not be spared, provided Englishmen allowed rational ideas any decisive influence in their political life; and the consequence of this abstention from ideas was the gradual cultivation of a contempt for intelligence, an excessive worship of tradition, and a deep-rooted faith in the value of compromise.

In the interest of domestic harmony they have identified complacent social subserviency with the virtue of loyalty, and have erected compromise into an ultimate principle of political action.
The landed aristocracy and gentry of England have been obliged to face only one serious crisis--the prolonged crisis occasioned by the transformation of Great Britain from an agricultural to an industrial community.

The way the English privileged classes preserved their political leadership during a period, in which land was ceasing to be the source of Great Britain's economic prosperity, is an extraordinary illustration of their political tact and social prestige.