Our Benevolent Feudalism

by William J. Ghent

VI. The villeins of the cities and towns, more or less regularly employed, who do skilled work and are partially protected by organization.

VII. The villeins of the cities and towns who do unskilled work and are unprotected by organization. They will comprise the laborers, domestics, and clerks.

VIII. The villeins of the manorial estates, of the great farms, the mines, and the forests.

IX. The small-unit farmers (land owning), the petty tradesmen, and manufacturers.

X. The subtenants on the manorial estates and great farms (corresponding to the class of “free tenants” in the old Feudalism).

XI. The cotters.

XII. The tramps, the occasionally employed, the unemployed—the wastrels of city and country.

The principle of gradation is the only one that can properly be applied. It is the relative degree of comfort—material, moral, and intellectual—which each class directly contributes to the nobility. The wastrels contribute least, and they are the lowest. The under-classes who do the hard work lay the basis of all wealth, but their contribution to the barons is indirect, and comes to its final goal through intermediate hands. The foremen and superintendents rightly hold a more elevated rank, and the entrepreneurs, who directly contribute most of the purely material comfort, will be found well up toward the top. Farther up in the social scale, partly from æsthetic and partly from utilitarian considerations, will be the scientists and artists. The new Feudalism, like most autocracies, will foster not only the arts, but also certain kinds of learning—particularly the kinds which are unlikely to disturb the minds of the multitude. A future Marsh or Cope or Le Conte will be liberally patronized and left free to discover what he will; and so, too, an Edison or a Marconi. Only they must not meddle with anything relating to social science. For obvious reasons, also, physicians will occupy a position of honor and comparative freedom under the new régime.

But higher yet is the rank of the court agents and retainers. This class will include the editors of “respectable” and “safe” newspapers, the pastors of “conservative” and “wealthy” churches, the professors and teachers in endowed colleges and schools, lawyers generally, and most judges and politicians. During the transition period there will be a gradual elimination of the more unserviceable of these persons, with the result that in the end this class will be largely transformed. The individual security of place and livelihood of its members will then depend on the harmony of their utterances and acts with the wishes of the great nobles. Theirs, in a sense, will be the most important function in the State—“to justify the ways of God [and the nobility] to man.” They will be the safeguards of the realm, the assuagers of popular suspicion and discontent. So long as they rightly fulfil their functions, their recompense will be generous; but such of them as have not the tact or fidelity to do or say what is expected of them will be promptly forced into class XI or XII, or, in extreme cases, banished from all classes, to become the wretched pariahs of society. At times two divisions of this class will find life rather a burdensome travail. They are the judges and the politicians. Holding their places at once by popular election and by the grace of the barons, they will be fated to a constant see-saw of conflicting obligations. They must, in some measure, satisfy the demands of the multitude, and yet, on the other hand, they must obey the commands from above.