The Death of the Gentleman and the Birth of Bureaucratic Tyranny
The Change that Brought Us to This Present Disaster Was Relatively Recent
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The Great Replacement of Gentlemen
Much is now made, with good cause, of the Great Replacement. That is, of course, the swamping of the First World by the Third, with predictable consequences. It has led to massive amounts of crime, unbearable demands on the treasuries of civilized countries, disunity, and all the other issues that come with multiculturalism, not the least of which is voting becoming a political war between antagonistic ethnic blocs rather than a productive debate on policy.
While a severe problem, this isn't the first "Great Replacement" to strike the modern West, nor is it the most destructive. Rather than being about demographics, the First Great Replacement, which largely occurred in the last few decades of the 19th Century and the first few of the 20th, was about social position and who was in charge; instead of being about 3rd World and 1st, it was about bean-counter bureaucrats replacing gentlemen and aristocrats as the leaders of most Western societies, with predictable consequences.
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Who Were Western Gentlemen?
Two terms must be defined before getting into the details of the First Great Replacement.
First, by “Western,” I mean not the long, cherished tradition stretching back to Homer and the Indo-Europeans. While they are certainly part of the Western tradition, the wars between the Greek city-states, the barbarian invasions of Rome, and even the Byzantines aren’t directly relevant to our present position. There was enough chaos and rebirth in the Middle Ages to create a civilization that, while not wholly new, was different enough to mark a new era from classical times. That civilization struggled, grew, and was gradually formed into something more recognizable for modern people by the time of the Glorious Revolution. Further, while the trends on Continental Europe were similar to the ones described in this article, the Anglosphere world presents a clearer picture than the Continent. So, it is the post-1688 Anglosphere world to which I am referring as the “Western” world, though much of Western history and tradition occurred before then and outside of those boundaries.
Second, by “gentleman,” I mean a man who lives off the rents of his tenant farmers, and whose family has held that land for at least a few generations. The term is broad, encompassing those from the wealthiest of the peerage, such as the Grosvenors and Percys, to the gentry in England and America who had much smaller holdings than the great peers. Critical is that, whatever their name or title, they were still able to live off rents or the work of others rather than the sweat of their own brow, and were those whose families had a tie to the place.1 Examples of that gentry class include George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in America and the Mosleys and Mordaunts in England.
Whatever their names or location, the critical aspect of the landed class, was that it had enough passive income derived from land to focus on more pressing matters, such as politics, without needing to make an income off of that work or use corruption to obtain a fortune.
The Old World
What Used to Exist
To understand what great change occurred, it's important to understand what used to exist. The world of the 17th, 18th, and even early 19th centuries was not a dull one where the cold calculus of financialized capitalism and mass bureaucracy stifled and swamped all culture, tradition, and national character, nor where the grey lives of the grey-clothed “Company Man” dominated.
Rather, it was one of less generalized prosperity than ours, admittedly, but much more beauty and glory. The Two Centuries of Aristocracy, roughly from William of Orange in 1688 to the 1880 British agricultural depression,2 was the era of elegance and greatness in civilized life and of adventure and opportunity elsewhere; what existed was governed by tradition and great men, not a vast and unaccountable bureaucracy.
For example, it was over this time that fox hunting became popular: men in their scarlet “Pink” coats3 chased foxes across the countryside, pursuing their hounds and the fox. Local farmers and yeomen were welcome to join the hunt and often did so, building bonds between the magnates and their neighbors.
It was also the period of the country house in Great Britain and America; towering and glorious mansions dominated the countryside, bringing not just activity to the area outside the Metropol but investment and better-paying jobs. A wealthy local magnate and his country house mean not just cleaner and less severe jobs in the great house than were available on farms, but investment in building clean and sturdy housing for the local laborers, investment in constructing similar buildings in the local town or village, and generally more prosperity in an area that otherwise might be blighted.
Skidelsky, describing what such a relationship looked like in his biography of the infamous Oswald Mosley, noted, of Mosley’s grandfather, a wealthy and powerful landed gentleman:
Mosley's adored and adoring grandfather was clearly a paternalist of the old school, who took his obligations and his rights very scriously. He was not without enterprise: the diversification from arable to livestock farming to counter the North American grain invasions of the 1880s saved the Rolleston economy for another generation, As a young man, he worked with his labourers in the field from dawn to dusk. He raised a prize-winning shorthorn herd, placed his pedigree bulls at the disposal of his tenants for a nominal fee, and remitted a portion of their rents in hard times.
He built cottages and a recreation hall for his workpeople, maintained a school for their children, an almshouse for the aged, a church for their spiritual health, and threw open his grounds to fêtes and fairs for their entertainment. His solicitude on one occasion took a positively Tolstoyan turn when he started baking a special wholemeal bread at the stone mill of Rolleston: ‘Standard Bread' provided Northcliffe's Daily Mail with one of its carliest journalistic stunts, and Rolleston was deluged for samples of the health-giving loaves.
While the aesthetics of the era were superb, so were the opportunities for adventure for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t spend their days on horseback. In an era without the instant communication of the telegraph or phone, sail-power rather than steam-power, and Western military equipment being without par, adventurers could travel the globe and reap great fortunes.
Courtney Selous and Cecil Rhodes tromped across southern Africa and settled it, building communities in Rhodesia and South Africa that lasted until Cold War America, Britain, and the communist bloc destroyed them.4 Sir James Brooke, tired of country house life, traveled to Borneo and conquered the local pirates, becoming a local ruler known as the “White Rajah” and ruling for decades.5 In America, similarly, Tennesseean gentleman William Walker grew tired of city life and conquered Nicaragua.6 A few years later, South Carolina gentleman Wade Hampton III was able to, out of his landed revenue and the wealth of similar magnates, raise the Hampton Legion to fight in the War Between the States.7
It was, in short, an era with great men and without much bureaucracy. The countryside was dotted with beautiful homes and governed by ancient traditions. The towns and villages were built up and invested in by local magnates,8 not local committees and bureaucratic petty tyrants, as is now the case,9 and those with a sense of adventure could go abroad and attempt to do as they pleased without worrying about the finger-wagging of an HR harridan chasing them around the world.
What’s more, that attitude carried into economic and political matters as well. Unlike today, the rulers and their minions were not a leviathan bureaucracy like our Deep State, Europe's notoriously large and inefficient bureaucratic system, or cubicle hell in corporate life. Rather, a small government was controlled mainly by gentlemen, and business had few rules and little paperwork. The British Civil Service, for example, which included the Colonial Office directing operations across nearly a quarter of the world’s surface, the Admiralty, which directed the Navy that ruled the waves for Britannia, the Foreign Office, amongst all domestic offices, had under 4,000 employees when the Empire was at its height.10
So, instead of HR harridans and finger-wagging bureaucrats, things happened because magnificent personalities made it so; Cecil Rhodes determined Rhodesia should be brought under British rule, James Brooke determined the pirates of Borneo should be pacified, the “Canal Duke” determined British inland navigation should be updated,11 and so on.
The bedrock of this system were the landed gentlemen, particularly the gentry. Those men of independent means were the ones who ensured things ran at the granular level. They ensured country life remained stable by serving as justices of the peace, on the local bench, and as judges. They were the ones with the resources and foresight to improve local infrastructure and help fund the joint-stock companies. They were the ones who served as the officers of the army, leading men at great personal and financial cost, as their salaries rarely covered their expenses.
To give some American examples, where would America have been without those like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Robert E. Lee, and John Calhoun? Some non-gentlemen were involved, namely Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jackson, but generally, those who led were landed gentlemen. They had the resources to be properly educated, the wealth to serve rather than earn, and the necessary moral framework to see service to a higher cause as a virtue.
Land was key to their ability to live and serve in such a manner. In that era, equities were risky, companies often failed in spectacular fashion, banks frequently faced similar fates, and safe government bonds were rare. Land, however, was the one asset that kept the principal safe and produced a relatively steady income without requiring the landlord to be involved to any great extent. Further, owning an estate granted the individual a large amount of political power, as he could generally trust his tenants to vote for him or his chosen candidate in exchange for lower rents, and could exert his will upon the local community to determine matters its appearance, the availability of liquor, the presence of public houses (pubs and bars), and similar matters. The loyalty between magnate and farmer wasn’t phantom either; it wasn’t a delusion for Lord Willoughby de Broke to consider raising the militia to resist the abominable Parliament Bill as late as 1911.12
As shown by the story of the Mosley baronets, perhaps most important for the community as a whole is that great landlords, whether gentry or aristocracy, with their wealth tied to a particular spot or spots, want stability and buy it with relationships and investment. They want things to be kept functional and, without a tradition of tyranny as in Prussia, want to keep the locals content by protecting their ancient rights and liberties. So, with land as their main asset, gentlemen ruled with a steady hand and kept things functional and free. Their attitude can be seen in John Randolph of Roanoke's famous quote: “I am an aristocrat. I love liberty, I hate equality.”
Loving liberty and hating equality was their motto, and it made sense. They were of old blood, often stretching back a millennium to William the Conqueror, if not earlier, and saw serving the state and its greatness, wherever they were, as their duty. So, they served it and national greatness while safeguarding the liberty of their nation’s inhabitants, with no small amount of success.
That success can be hard to recognize because it is the sea in which people swam for generations, so it’s unmentioned in books. The freedom of action man before Lincoln or Reform had was immense, and hard to contemplate in our present, Kafkaesque bureaucratic tyranny.13 But, look, and it’s there. With few exceptions, there is almost never talk in pre-1860s books of regulatory permission, the whims of bureaucrats, local scolds stopping economic progress, or anything of the sort. Rather, great men decided to do something and did it. That was the environment the gentlemen of the Anglosphere fought for and preserved, with the valiant efforts of American gentlemen like Washington, Jefferson, Lee, and Hampton filling history books with their aristocratic fights for liberty.
The Death of the Gentleman
Unfortunately for all who, like John Randolph, love liberty and see equality as a false god, all good things come to an end, including gentlemanly rule. That end came in the cataclysm of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the American Southeast, the cause of our gentry’s decline was obvious: Mr. Lincoln smashed the sons of the American Revolution, killing the great-grandchildren of the Founding Fathers14 while sending Sherman to burn their farms and ravage the land. As Darryl Cooper described the situation in his excellent “Battering the Battering Ram” essay:15
[The] Irish immigrants, in their turn, had been used by the Eastern establishment to fight its crusade against the Confederacy. Nearly half of all Union soldiers were either recent immigrants, often signed up on the docks as soon as they left their ships, or else the first-generation children of immigrants. We’re not here to debate the causes of the US Civil War, so I’ll just point out that there was great enthusiasm for it among the elites of the Northeast, and I’ve always found it unseemly that most of them bought their sons’ exemptions from combat while importing hundreds of thousands of foreign ringers to go South and kill the grandsons of the American Revolution… but I digress.
Estates were ravaged and broken up as Union troops marched in during and after the war, as depicted in heartrending detail in Gone with the Wind, and Southern Gentlemen sometimes remained fixtures of their local community, but nearly always nothing more. Most of the best and brightest had been butchered during the war and, for those who survived, the political scene generally, loyalty pledges, and dramatic destruction of wealth made recovery to a pre-war level nearly impossible.16
However, the cause of the gentlemen’s decline was different in the Northeast and Britain. Other than in Ireland, where the tenants often burned the houses of the local peers as Anglo-Irish tensions rose due to Irish nationalism, estates weren't burned, and butchery of the gentlemen didn't happen until WWI, at which point the change had already occured. Most Yankees with wealth bought substitutes, and Britain's conflicts weren't particularly bloody. Rather, their campaigns were often nearly bloodless (for the British) adventures of the sort Churchill went on.17
Rather, economic changes ravaged the gentlemen of the non-Confederate Anglosphere. In Britain, it was the repeal of the Corn Laws finally led to catastrophe in 1880 when global shipping technology caught up with Britain's open market and decimated farming profits.18 When paired with death taxes and ever-higher income taxes, these obliterated the small gentlemen, who had to sell their now uneconomic farms to pay the taxes.19 They then found themselves landless and not gentlemen; instead of living off rents and serving the state as Members of Parliament, cavalrymen, or colonial officials, they had to work for a living and no longer had time to serve the state out of a sense of honor and duty.
In the rest of the Anglosphere, the same general conditions, along with the fact that there hadn't been as much of a gentry tradition as in the south and England, meant that class was eviscerated. A few survived for a time despite changing economic conditions, taxes, and inflation, like Henry Adams until his death. Generally, however, only the ultra-wealthy could afford to serve rather than work, and they generally lost interest in doing so as society turned against them and toward democracy.
The Modern Bureaucratic Apparatus
While bureaucracy had been condemned to the history books and Imperial China during the aristocratic heyday, it returned with a vengeance as employees replaced gentlemen in the governmental apparatus.
Because of the aforementioned economic changes, gentlemen who had to work could no longer fill unpaid positions for familial prestige. They needed to work. So, the government apparatus across the Western world still needed people to rule, govern, and administer but no longer had the gentry to rely on. Instead, it had to find people to work for it.
It found them in what became the lower middle class, bureaucratic class, which meant two big changes occurred. First, governments were relying on people of a much different social caliber than before, making government schooling more important, as it would be what built the minds and worldviews of the new agents of the state, not the traditional schools of gentlemen like Eton. Second, it meant that the new government employees had to be paid enough to live.
Thus, instead of being staffed by a few gentlemen who made few regulatory rules and thought the government that governed best governed least, governments became staffed by bureaucrats from a class that was (and remains) unsure of itself and financially insecure, relying on paychecks rather than investment income to survive. These bureaucrats cared far less about liberty and far more about establishing their little fiefdoms inside this or that formerly meaningless but now expensive and powerful bureaucratic body. They had no financial security in great estates on which they could rely, so instead, they had to rely on developing security by issuing more and more regulations and becoming embedded in the bureaucratic system.
Those changes, in turn, led to two other big changes.
First, liberty was far less protected. Whereas the gentlemen rarely wanted more rules because they'd have to live under them, more bureaucrats meant never-ending streams of regulation. This can be seen in the immensely burdensome regulations of modern states, regulations that began to be implemented during the Progressive Era,20 which is the same time hired bureaucrats displaced gentlemen.
The second big change was in taxes. Up until the Progressive Era, or the beginning of bureaucracy and regulation in the West, taxes were quite light and generally indirect. Land was occasionally taxed at low rates, tariffs made up the majority of state revenues, income tax was seen as abominable, and death taxes and capital gains taxes were inconceivable. Unpaid legislators and a handful of administrators, the system of the gentry, soak up little money; what taxes there were paid largely for the military and postal service. Buildings full of bureaucrats, however, soak up money by the trainload, which requires ever more taxation. That sucks life out of the economy, which means that more taxes are needed, a death cycle that looks a lot like England in the 1950s: an anemic economy, sky-high taxes, and bureaucracy that'd make the Byzantines blush.21
Calvin Coolidge, describing that drift toward bureaucratic tyranny in an address given at William and Mary, said, “No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.”22 Indeed, and it’s what we saw when the gentlemen disappeared, and the bureaucrats rose around the turn of the Twentieth Century.
In adopting such a system, the Occident became much more like the near-East Byzantines or Chinese Empire: oppressive lands of diktat issued largely by overpaid bureaucrats who relied on high taxes to pay their salaries. Liberty, of course, withered on the vine. Freedom of association, sanctity of property rights and contracts, freedom from onerous taxation, etc. All died to a large degree as the bureaucrats took over, with the result that now the Civil Rights Act dictates to whom you can sell your home, and it is more illegal to remove squatters than to illegally occupy property.23 Now you can’t even build a pond on your own farm without a bureaucratic stamp of approval and your income is taxed at 50%, the very sort of tyranny against which the Founders fought.24
This Didn’t Need to Happen, but Liberty Dies with the Gentry.
That need not have been the case. The Twentieth Century could have been a tale of liberty, commercial innovation, and imperial success on a grand scale. It wasn’t, largely because post-aristocratic governments engaged in butchery on a grand scale instead, and armies of bureaucrats were hired to oppress the subjects of the West’s great states rather than let them live free and innovate as they had done during the aristocratic belle epoque.
Such is, unfortunately, probably the result of petite bourgeoise insecurity in comparison with the gentlemen they replaced. Georgetown professor and historian Carrol Quigley, describing the shift from security to insecurity in his excellent Time and Tragedy, wrote:
The nobles defended this world, and the clergy opened the way to the next world, while the peasants provided the food and other material needs for the whole society. All three had security in their social relationships in that they occupied positions of social status that satisfied their psychic needs for companionship, economic security, a foreseeable future, and the purpose of their efforts. Members of both classes had little anxiety about loss of these things by any likely outcome of events, and all thus had emotional security.
In the course of the medieval period, chiefly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this simple two-class society was modified by the intru-ison of a small, but distinctly different, new class between them. Because this new class was between, we call it middle class, just as we call it "bourgeois" (after bourg meaning town) from the fact that it resided in towns, a new kind of social aggregate. The two older, established, classes were almost completely rural and intimately associated with the land, economically, socially, and spiritually. The permanence of the land and the intimate connection of the land with the most basic of human needs, especially food, amplified the emotional security associated with the older classes.
The new middle class of bourgeoisie who grew up between the two older classes had none of these things. They were commercial peoples concerned with exchange of goods, mostly luxury goods, in a society where all their prospective customers already had the basic necessities of life provided by their status. The new middle class had no status in a society based on status; they had no security or permanence in a society that placed the highest value on these qualities. They had no law (since medieval law was largely past customs, and their activities were not customary ones) in a society that highly valued law. The flow of the necessities of life, notably food, to the new town dwellers was precarious, so that some of their earliest and most emphatic actions were taken to ensure the flow of such goods from the surrounding country to the town. All the things the bourgeois did were new things; all were precarious, and insecure; and their whole lives were lived without the status, permanence, and security the society of the day most highly valued. The risks (and rewards) of commercial enterprise, well reflected in the Auctuating fortunes of figures such as Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, were ex-treme. A single venture could ruin a merchant or make him rich. This insecurity was increased by the fact that the prevalent religion of the day disapproved of what he was doing, seeking profits or taking interest, because of the intimate assosiation wof the ecclesiastical system with the existing arrangmeent of rural landholding.
For these and other reasons psychic insecurity became the keynote of the new middle-class outlook. It still is.
While that change began in the Middle Ages, as Quigley notes, it was really in the Progressive Era, as discussed here, that it impacted the government and, thus, liberty. That, in turn, led to increasing levels of acquisitiveness from government officials attempting to profit off their position in the Crenshaw and Pelosi mold,25 and never-ending and constant regulation that increases the size of the bureaucratic apparatus (the government is now America’s top employer and second-largest hirer)26 while making all of us indescribably worse off. Your lightbulbs are terrible because of regulation,27 your toilet, shower, and dishwasher work poorly because of regulation,28 and your truck is too large and too expensive from regulation,29 and that’s without getting into the immense cost in taxes and wasted time those regulations and those like them bring.
That could change, but not without fundamentally altering the state of the Western economic system and government apparatus. For example, the government should be small and have no reason to expand inexorably, but that isn’t possible when bureaucrats rely on their jobs for their livelihood and feel the need to keep growing their teams to feel relatively more secure. The incentives are too far removed from what is needed. However, the Colonial Office remained remarkably small when it was ruling a quarter of the world,30 indicating that keeping a government department now can be done.
The difference lies in personnel. Men who are tied to the land and secure in their social status and wealth because of those holdings have no reason to fill their department with tiresome imbeciles just to make it look more important. They have no reason to raise taxes that will destroy their estates, to pass regulations that make business on their estates impossible, or generally to decrease their value with regulation that causes people to flee the country or stop investing in it. Instead, they have the incentives to keep the country humming along in a stable way while protecting liberty to avoid the threat of revolutionary chaos resulting from overregulation. Bureaucrats don’t have any of those incentives, as shown by the budding revolutions against their rule in Western Europe.31
But thanks to economic changes, those bureaucrats are in charge. Like with the Great Replacement now, they completely displaced those who came before them thanks to economic incentives and caused tragedy and unpleasantness by doing so. Their decisions led to the mass migration of the present, something that certainly didn’t happen in the Georgian and Victorian periods.
The counterpoint, of course, is that the gentleman were corrupt. The life of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, is the story of bureaucratic corruption.32 John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough, was, in terms of corruption and reliance on the public purse, little better. Both, however, delivered the great victories of the War of Spanish Succession,33 unlike the do-nothing bureaucrats of today.
Similarly, Evans makes the case in Our Old Nobility that many of the noble families began not with William the Conqueror like the Grosvenors or Percys,34 but rather by corruption in the court, particularly by pilfering the former church estates under Henry VIII. However, those stories all prove the point that social anxiety is at the root of corruption: few of the families involved with Henry were established families, and Brydges and Churchill were aspirants rather than established gentlemen. It was their wish for security that led to their corruption, much like today’s bureaucrats have their tyranny rooted in social anxiety and worries about money. The difference is that once the corrupt families established their wealth, they left the corruption behind and behaved honorably; the Russells are a prime example. Bureaucrats, on the other hand, never leave the tyranny and corruption behind. It’s their job description, all they do.
So, the first Great Replacement was somehow even worse than this one in that it both led to the abominable present and fundamentally altered the very fabric of the West in a disastrously bad way.
Featured image from: Pughe, J. S. , Artist. The struggle of the Slav / J.S. Pughe. N.Y.: J. Ottmann Lith. Co., Puck Bldg. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2011645712/>.
See, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class by Mingay
For example, the 7th Duke of Devonshire famously invested in Barrow-in-Furness https://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/25n2a1.pdf; similarly the Marquesses of Bute famously invested quite heavily in Cardiff
See, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England by Phillips
For a broad overview of the impact of capitalism on the post-War Southern economy, see, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition
See, for example, his books The Story of the Malakland Field Force and The River War
See, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class by Mingay and English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century by FML Thompson
See, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by Cannadine and The Dukes by Brian Masters
Chandos delivered the financing that kept the military machine humming along, https://canonsparkfriends.org/corruption-canons-and-the-duke-of-chandos/; Marlborough delivered the military victories, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Churchill,_1st_Duke_of_Marlborough#War_of_the_Spanish_Succession_(1701%E2%80%931714)
Well argued, been dealing with bureaucrats for years, am now planning a flight to deeper in the north nearer to the arctic (namely the Arctic corners of Quebec), to establish a country-estate so to speak. We must re-establish and preserve the old ways slowly, one year at a time. At present, I'm doing so with my literary works and also with small moves every month towards the country and towards a freer life.
It’s almost like the author has never heard of Benjamin Franklin or Michael Faraday or Andrew Carnegie or Henry Ford or Thomas Edison or Louis Salk or Alexander Fleming or…
What is he talking about? The 20th century wasn’t a time of commerce? Really?
And Robert E. Lee was a great gentleman? Is treason to his oath and country really such a great cause?