of a thousand years and they had always been men who loved
their home and shared in the work, the life, and the sport of
their countryside. Radical Jack was no less the squire for being
the first Earl. His duty took him to London, to St. Petersburg,
and to Toronto, but his heart was always in the tall house
above the Wear. In that he was like his father-in-law, Earl
Grey, who, even as Prime Minister, was always sick at heart for
Howick and his own land.

It was so with many of their fellow-aristocrats, to whom
court and camp, embassy and mission were only interludes
in the real life of country house and hunting field. Lord
Althorp, when he was a Junior Lord of the Treasury, used to
keep relays of horses on the road to Leicestershire and to ride
all night so that he might enjoy a day with the Quorn and ride
back to London at the end of it. That attachment to the country
was the real difference between the French and the English
aristocrats and it was to save the British when their people, in
their own slow and, on the whole, good-humoured way, began
to accomplish their own revolution. The great French lords
looked always to Paris as to their heaven and to Versailles as
to their sun. To them the country was exile and the peasants
were a source of income and a pool of labour. The great
English families -- Lambton, Grey, Spencer, Cavendish-Ben-
tinck, Mowbray-- may have blossomed in London but their
roots were in the country. They regarded the court at Windsor
or St. James's with just as much respect as its master could
command by his own character, which was not very much
in the early nineteenth century. They were, many of them,
improving landlords, and, nearly all of them, sportsmen. As
boys they ran wild on the estate, wrestling, swimming, ferreting
with the sons of grooms and keepers. At Eton or Harrow or
Winchester, they were fed and treated worse than most grooms'
sons. After their schooling and perhaps their years at the
University, they came back to the country to hunt, to shoot,
later to administer summary, but seldom tyrannical justice
from the county bench, to read the lessons in the churches
where they had been baptized. The tie between them and their
people was lifelong and was not to be broken by years of
absence in Navy and Army and Foreign embassies, or months
in Westminster.

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