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The aristocracy, with the exception of a few wealthy brewers and cigar manufacturers of Manila, is a land-holding one. There is practically no bourgeoisie no commercial class between the rich and the poor.
But the Parliament the organ of the land-holding tenant-ruling gentry did not keep its power long. The change had already come in the nineteenth century. The franchises had been broadened until it included masses of ignorant men, 'urban myriads, who went in their featureless thousands to vote together. And the natural consequence of a swarming constituency is the rule of the party organisation.
Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Municipal and Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or mandate from, the constituencies by which these bodies had been chosen, partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound by the acts of its constituted representatives.
It did not perish like a piece of outworn tissue pushed off by a new growth from within: on the contrary, it was arbitrarily cut away while yet fresh and vital, with the result that where a bud should have been there was a scar. This sudden change in the system of land-holding was followed by a century of reprisals and confiscations, and what war began the law continued.
The first great class is the class that owns and holds land and land-like claims upon the community, from the Throne downward. This Court and land-holding class cannot go on being rich and living rich during the strains of the coming years. The reconstructing world cannot bear it. Whatever rises in rent may occur through the rise in prices, must go to meet the tremendous needs of the State.
In the smaller towns the proportion of property owners was larger, while in the country the majority of the population belonged to the land-holding class, 64.4 per cent. of the "farm" families owning their homes, 44.4 per cent. of such families owning homes that were unencumbered.
Individual ownership in the European sense is a comparatively late development. The Congolese authorities must have known this; for nearly all troubles with native races have arisen from the profound differences in the ideas of the European and the savage on the subject of land-holding.
'Nay; but I go very swiftly, said Bahadur Khan. 'Look! I am even now a dead man. He lifted his foot, and to the little toe there clung the head of the half-killed snake, firm fixed in the agony of death. 'I come of land-holding stock, said Bahadur Khan, rocking where he stood. 'It were a disgrace to me to go to the public scaffold: therefore I take this way.
Traditionally the power of the king had been restricted by a Parliament, composed of a House of Lords and a House of Commons, and as the former was then far more influential than the latter, supreme political control had rested practically with the king and the members of the upper house great land-holding nobles and the princes of the church.
The Germans in the Provinces of Livonia, Courland, and Esthonia formed the majority only among the land-holding and merchant classes; and the curbing of their semi-feudal privileges wore the look of a democratic reform. The case was far different with the Finns. They are a non-Aryan people, and therefore differ widely from the Swedes and Russians.
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