When this occurs, as it actually has occurred, all the cultural and political reasons for the maintenance of a gentry vanish. It always does occur when city life grows up and takes the place of country life. When a peeress resides on her estates in a part of the country where life is still very simple, and the nearest thing to a town is a village ten miles from the railway station, the people look to her ladyship for everything that is not produced by their daily toil. She represents all the splendor and greatness and romance of civilization, and does a good deal for them which they would not know how to do for themselves. In this way a Highland clan, before Scotland became civilized, always had a chief. The clansmen willingly gave him the lion’s share of such land and goods as they could come by, or of the plunder they took in their raids. They did this because they could not fight successfully without a leader, and could not live together without a lawgiver. Their chief was to them what Moses was to the Israelites in the desert. The Highland chief was practically a king in his clan, just as the peeress is a queen on her estates. Loyalty to him was instinctive. But when a Highland chief walked into a city he had less power than the first police constable he met: in fact it sometimes happened that the police constable took him in charge, and the city authorities hanged him. When the peeress leaves her estate and goes up to London for the season, she becomes a nobody except to her personal acquaintances. Everything that she does for her people in the country is done in London by paid public servants of all sorts; and when she leaves the country and settles in America or on the Continent to evade British income tax she is not missed in London: everything goes on just as before. But her tenants, who have to earn the money she spends abroad, get nothing by her, and revile her as a fugitive and an Absentee. Small wonder then that Oligarchy is no longer consented to willingly. A great deal of the money the oligarchs get is now taken back from them by taxation and death duties; so that the old families are being reduced very rapidly to the level of ordinary citizens; and when their estates are gone, as they will be after a few generations more of our present heavy death duties, their titles will only make their poverty ridiculous. Already many of their most famous country houses are occupied either by rich business families of quite ordinary quality, or by Co-operative Societies as Convalescent Homes or places for conference and recreation, or as hotels or schools or lunatic asylums.