Such then was feudalism in the concrete. It is the
negation of all that we hold to be most important in the conceptions of the
state and citizenship. In effect, though not altogether in theory, it
subordinates the obligations of the citizen to those which the individual
incurs by entering on a voluntary contract. This contract may or may not be
made with the ruler of the state; in the majority of cases it is made with a fellow-citizen.
Though honourable, according to current ideas, this contract always leaves to
the lord some loopholes for the exercise of arbitrary and capricious authority;
it impairs, if it does not destroy, the rule of law. Again, the effect of the
system is to throw the main burden of national defence, and the main control of
the royal power, upon a close hereditary caste of landowners. The standard of
public duty is lowered; the government becomes either an absolutism or an
oligarchy, and in either case studies chiefly the interests of a class which despises
industry and holds privilege to be the necessary basis of society.
Under
feudalism the powers of the Crown, executive, judicial, administrative, are
often granted away to be held by the same tenure as the fiefs over which they
are exercised. And thus is created the worst form of civil service that we can
conceive; a corps of hereditary officials, who can only be checked or removed
with extreme difficulty, who render no account of the sums which they collect
under the name of fines or dues, who are seldom educated to the point of
realising that, even in their private interest, honesty is the best policy. If
this system had developed to its logical conclusion, if the principles of feudal
government had not been mitigated by revolt from below and interested tyranny
from above, the only possible end would have been a state of particularism and
anarchy compared with which the Germany of the fifteenth century, or the Italy
of the eighteenth, might be called an earthly paradise.
