Some of our great landholders inherit their land from feudal times, when there were no factories nor railways, and when towns were so small that they were walled in as gardens are now. In those days the landholders, with the king at their head, had to raise armies and defend the country at their own cost. They had to make the laws and administer them, doing military work, police work, and government work of all sorts. Henry IV, who died of overwork, found to his cost how true it was in those days that the greatest among us must be servant to all the rest. Nowadays it is the other way about: the greatest is she to whom all the rest are servants. All the chores and duties of the feudal barons are done by paid officials. In country places they may still sit on the Bench as unpaid magistrates; and there remains the tradition that military service as officers is proper for their sons. A few of them, with the help of solicitors and agents, manage the estates on which they actually live, or allow their wives to do it. But these are only vestiges of a bygone order, maintained mostly by rich purchasers of estates who are willing to take a little trouble to be ranked as country gentlemen and county ladies. There are always newly enriched folk who have this vanity for a while, and will buy the estate of a real country gentleman to take on his position in the country. But at any moment our landed gentry, whether they are so by descent or purchase, can sell their country houses and parks, and live anywhere they please in the civilized world without any public duties or responsibilities. Sooner or later they all do so, thus breaking the only link that binds them to the old feudal aristocracy save their names and titles. For all the purposes of the real world of today there is no longer a feudal aristocracy: it is merged in the industrial capitalist class, with which it associates and intermarries without distinction, money making up for everything. If it be still necessary to call the rich an ocracy of any kind, they must be called a plutocracy, in which the oldest ducal estate and the newest fortune made in business are only forms of capital, imposing no public duties on the owner.