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By Root 1153 0

the racecourse, in the hunting field … one of the brightest military stars in London Society,” Colonel Brabazon of the 10th Hussars. Six feet tall, with clean and symmetrical features, bright gray eyes and strong jaw, he had a moustache the Kaiser would have envied, and ideas to match. Testifying before the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1902 on the lessons of the Boer War, in which he had commanded the Imperial Yeomanry, General Brabazon (as he now was) “electrified the Commission by a recital of his personal experiences in hand to hand fighting and his theories of the use of the Cavalry Arm in war.” These included, as reported by Lord Esher to the King, “life-long mistrust of the weapons supplied to the Cavalry and his preference for shock tactics by men armed with a Tomahawk.” Giving his evidence “in a manner highly characteristic of that gallant officer … he drew graphic pictures of a Cavalry charge under these conditions which proved paralyzing to the imagination of the Commissioners.” They next heard Colonel Douglas Haig, lately chief Staff officer of the cavalry division in the South African War, deplore the proposed abolition of the lance and affirm his belief in the arme blanche, that is, the cavalry saber, as an effective weapon.

At home in the country, among his tenants and cottagers, crops and animals, on the estate that dominated the life of the district of which “The House” was the large unit and the village the small, on the land that his family had owned and cultivated and rented out and drawn income from for generations, the English patrician bloomed in his natural climate. Here from childhood on he lived closely with nature, with the sky and trees, the fields and birds and deer in the woods. “We were richly endowed in the surpassing beauty of the homes in which we were reared,” wrote Lady Frances Balfour. The stately houses—Blenheim of the Dukes of Marlborough, Chatsworth of the Dukes of Devonshire, Wilton of the Earls of Pembroke, Warwick Castle of the Earls of Warwick, Knole of the Sackvilles, Hatfield of the Salisburys—had three or four hundred rooms, a hundred chimneys, and roofs measured in acres. Others less grand often had been lived in longer, like Renishaw, inhabited by the Sitwells for at least seven hundred years. Owners great and small never finished adding on to or altering the house and improving the landscape. They removed or created hills, conjured up lakes, diverted streams, and cut vistas through their woods finished off by a marble pavilion to fix the eye.

Their homes proliferated. A town house, a family estate, a second country home, a shooting box in a northern county, another in Scotland, possibly a castle in Ireland were not out of the ordinary. Besides Hatfield and his London house on Arlington Street, Lord Salisbury owned Walmer Castle in Deal, the Manor House at Cranborne in Dorsetshire, his villa in France, and if he had been a sporting man, would have had a place in Scotland or a racing stud near Epsom or Newmarket. There were 115 persons in Great Britain who owned over 50,000 acres each, and forty-five of these owned over 100,000 acres each, although much of this was uncultivatable land in Scotland whose income yield was low. There were some sixty to sixty-five persons, all peers, who possessed both land over 50,000 acres and income over £50,000, and fifteen of these—seven dukes, three marquesses, three earls, one baron and one baronet—had landed incomes of over £100,000. In all of Great Britain, out of a population of 44,500,000, there were 2,500 landowners who owned more than 3,000 acres apiece and had landed incomes of over £3,000.

Income taxes were not payable on incomes under £160 and in this category there were approximately eighteen to twenty million people. Of these, about three million were in white-collar or service trades—clerks, shopmen, tradesmen, innkeepers, farmers, teachers—who earned an average of £75 a year. Fifteen and a half million were manual workers, including soldiers, sailors, postmen and policemen and those in agricultural and domestic service