Imperial household

“ In conversation with many of them afterwards it was interesting to hear the sons of settlers referring to the England that they had never seen, as "home." That night I realized as never before,—not even amid the agony and sacrifice of the Somme or the Ancre in France,—one reason why the British Empire is great and why, despite all muddling, it carries on. It lies in the feeling of imperial kinship far out at the frontiers of civilization. The colonial is in many respects a more devoted loyalist than the man at home. ”

“ The argument that the nation should foster large families in order more quickly to people the untenanted portions of the Empire, and so add to the strength and wealth of the British Dominions, requires serious attention, not in isolation, but in conjunction with other considerations, and calls forth varying opinions from economists. ”

“ When they decree you a civil and a military household, you, like young Achilles among the daughters of Lycomedes, eagerly seize the sword and scorn the mere ornaments." The Queen persisted in her determination to have no civil household. "If," said she, "this constitutional household be formed, not a single person of rank will remain with us, and upon a change of affairs we should be obliged to discharge the persons received into their place." ”

“ HOUSEHOLD, ROYAL. In all the medieval monarchies of western Europe the general system of government sprang from, and centred in, the royal household. The sovereign’s domestics were his officers of state, and the leading dignitaries of the palace were the principal administrators of the kingdom. The royal household itself had, in its turn, grown out of an earlier and more primitive institution. ”

“ It will readily be seen how extremely valuable is such a range of discussion as this, in a comparatively new country, where each household must so largely depend upon its own resources. "The strength of the Empire is in the homes of her people," said one lecturer, and the opinion is wide-spread. ”

“ CHAPTER V.— PRIMOGENITURE
GREEKS, Romans, Britons, Saxons, divided lands equally, some among all the children, some among males only. But when the Emperors of Germany began to create honorary feuds, or titles of nobility, estates were made "impartible," that is, descending to the eldest son. This was done to increase the dignity of the "Counts of the Empire." The splitting up of estates was also inconvenient for military service, and younger sons were induced to take up with a country life, instead of engaging in military or civil employments. ”

“ The imperial dignity was not the only matter involved in the succession, but a vast amount of property also, and so many members of the imperial clan were interested in the result that it was deemed certain that the partisans of legitimacy would lie in wait for an opportunity of enforcing the claims of the rightful heir. ”

“ The Imperial mother may virtually go to sleep, until aroused at this stage of her children's and her grandchildren's growth by a call to adjudicate, as the supreme parent, upon the impending and, perhaps, contentious question of separation, while she finds at the same moment that a forty-fifth or a fiftieth member is about to be added to the world-wide colonial family. ”

“ The reason for this lay in the fact that for the aristocratic families, who were in possession of vast lands and many flocks, it was easy to provide themselves from their own estates with the wool necessary to clothe all their household, from masters to the numerous retinue of slaves. ”

“ One day the empire awoke in terror to the fact that the imperial family—that family in which the legions, the provinces, and the barbarians saw the keystone of the state—no longer existed; that in the vast imperial palace, empty of women, empty of children, empty of hope, there wandered a raging madman of thirty-one, who divorced a wife every six months, who foolishly wasted the treasure and the blood of his subjects, and who was concerned with no other thought than that of having himself worshiped like a god in flesh and blood by all the empire. ”

“ The family has ceased to exist; we have only individuals. In their desire to become a nation, Frenchmen have abandoned the idea of empire; in proclaiming the equal rights of all children to their father's inheritance, they have killed the family spirit and created the State treasury. ”

“ In Germany, as you know, all lands that, are not fiefs are equally divided among all the children, which ruins those families; but all male fiefs of the empire descend unalienably to the next male heir, which preserves those families. ”

“ Our imperial ancestors and imperial parent, like gods, like sages, accumulated happiness and amassed glory. Many years elapsed from the date when our heavenly ancestor descended until now it is over 1,792,470 years. But the remote regions do not yet enjoy the blessings of imperial rule. Every town has always been allowed to have its lord, and every village its chief, who, each one for himself, makes division of territory and practises mutual aggression and conflict. ”

“ VI. In all the establishments of royal and noble households, we find an ample provision made for the minstrels; and their situation to have been both honourable and lucrative. In proof of this it is sufficient to refer to the Household Book of the Earl of Northumberland, A.D. 1512. ”

“ There are hosts of noble families whose means enable them to maintain a proper state, and to keep up the dignity of their ancient houses; and this, be it remembered, is in truth their only calling, for as a class or body the nobles had no influence or power in the Government of the kingdom. ”

“ Lastly, it has been made clear that Home Rule cannot possibly assist, but can only obscure and confuse, the movement for the establishment of a true Imperial Union. Unionists and Imperialists can choose no better ground for their resistance to Home Rule than the wide and varied field of Colonial experience. ”

“ Every primeval family necessarily had to divide after a few generations. The originally communistic and collective household existing far into the middle stage of barbarism, involved a certain maximum size of the family, variable according to conditions, but still limited in a degree. ”

“ Besides the imperial cities, and the princes and other immediate nobles, there were the mediate nobles, the men who held land in fief of the highest classes of the aristocracy, and who, in virtue of this feudal relation, looked down upon the allodial proprietors or freemen, and upon the burghers. There were also mediate towns, acknowledging the supremacy of some lord other than the sovereign. Beneath all these, forming the mass of the agricultural population, were the peasantry and the serfs, the latter attached to the land, the former ground down by heavy taxes. ”

“ What a reproach was it to me, that, descended from one of the most illustrious families in Europe, the heir of an ample patrimony, and receiving a still larger fortune in marriage, I should, by the total neglect and profligate defiance of the duties incumbent on me, have reduced myself so low as to be indebted to a peasant and a menial for the means of saving my family from instant destruction! ”

“ A statute against riots, forcible entries, and, excepting the King, magnates' liveries of uniform, food, and badges to their retainers, except in war outside the nation, was passed, but was difficult to enforce because the offenders were lords, who dominated the Parliament and the council.
With men so often gone to fight, their wives managed the household alone. The typical wife had maidens of equal class to whom she taught household management, spinning, weaving, carding wool with iron wool-combs, heckling flax, embroidery, and making garments. ”

“ If any man throughout the empire has a family, including wife and children, amounting to three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine individuals, he must give up one to be a soldier. With regard to the rest, the widowers, widows, orphans, and childless, together with the sick and feeble, shall be excused from service, and shall all be fed from the public granary. ”

“ The smaller tenants-in-chief, the imperial knights, were not regarded as an Estate of the Empire and were excluded from all part in the Diet. Neither the custom which secured that the voting power of a much divided house should be no greater than that of a family whose power was vested in a single hand, nor that which gave only collective votes to the counts, prelates and towns, had as yet sprung into existence. ”

“ Accordingly, if one of the feudal lords thought of putting forward a claim to the imperial throne, he felt compelled to demonstrate that his family was just as much of divine origin as the emperor's, and perhaps of remoter origin. In this matter the travelling "scholars" rendered valuable service as manufacturers of genealogical trees. Each of the old noble families already had its family tree, as an indispensable requisite for the sacrifices to ancestors. ”

“ That the title of Emperor, and the Imperial power, be made hereditary in his family, in the male line, according to the order of primogeniture: that in introducing into the organization of the constituted authorities, the modifications rendered necessary by the establishment of hereditary power, the equality, the liberty, and the rights of the people, shall be preserved in all their integrity. ”

“ We began to be, and we ultimately became a great imperial power in the eighteenth century, but, during the greater part of that time, the colonies were regarded, not only by us, but by every European power that possessed them, as possessions valuable in proportion to the pecuniary advantage which they brought to the mother country, which, under that order of ideas, was, not truly a mother at all, but appeared rather in the light of a grasping and absentee landlord desiring to take from his tenants the utmost rents he could exact. ”

“ Lords surrounded themselves with people of the next lower rank, usually from nearby families, and had large households. For instance, the king had a circle of noblemen and ladies about him. A peer or great prelate had a household of about 100-200 people, among which were his inner circle, companions, administrators, secretaries, bodyguards and armed escort, chaplain, singing priests and choirboys, and servants. All officers of the household were gentlemen. ”

“ There is not, perhaps, in all Europe a similar complete carelessness for the traditions of the soil and for the attachment of a family to an ancestral piece of land as is to be found among these few thousand squires. The system remains, but the individual families, the particular lineages, appear without astonishment and are destroyed almost without regret. Aliens, Orientals and worse, enter the ruling class, and are received without surprise; names that recall the Elizabethans go out, and are not mourned. ”

“ An advantage in living in a civilised land which is really governed lies in the fact that all the Kings and Queens and Emperors of the continent are closely related by blood or marriage—are, in fact, one large family. ”

“ With the development of the feudal system in mediaeval Europe, which made the poor man, especially the peasant, dependent on the lord or owner of the land he cultivated, the lords appropriated in time unlimited sway over their vassals. ”

“ Indeed all the royal palaces abound with noble families returned from exile, and who have nestling-places allotted them while they await the restoration of their estates, or the much-talked-of law indemnity. Some of them have fine quarters, but poor living. Some families have but five or six hundred francs a year, and all their retinue consists of a servant-woman. With all this, they maintain their old aristocratical hauteur, look down with vast contempt upon the opulent families which have risen since the revolution ”

“ All these forces combined made the wide dispersion of wealth, in the early days of the nineteenth century, an American characteristic, in marked contrast with the European system of family prestige and vast estates based on the law of primogeniture. ”

“ And in the peasant class the marriage was liable to all the caprices and irregularities to be expected in a state of things where the will of the master was scarcely restrained by law or custom, so that he had the social happiness of his people very much in his own hands. ”

“ Why, look at the French; since the Code Napoleon, which chopped up the land into little blocks and gave each child his share, there have been no great families in France. Money a young fellow can squander, but he cannot get rid of his ancestral acres, when they are tightly tied up to come to his eldest son. ”

“ Admirable as the feudal system was in maintaining the necessary subordination of different classes, it acted most injuriously upon the homes, where all that makes up a nation’s real worth must be carefully tended in the first instance. Wardships. The very foundation of domestic life was in many cases vitiated by a system which put the wardship and marriage of heirs under age at the disposal of their superior lords. ”

“ If, however, such first born son shall have departed from this world without leaving male legitimate lay heirs,—by virtue of the present imperial edict, the right, vote and aforesaid power of electing shall devolve upon the elder lay brother descended by the true paternal line, and thence upon his first born lay son. ”

“ The fine moral training which the family relation alone can inspire we find not only at our own door, in the fidelity and self-sacrificing devotion of our noble Highlanders, who derived their inspiration from the clan system, of which the family love and respect is the binding element,2 as contrasted with the slavish system of vassalage, the badge of feudalism ”

“ This has been owing to their having considered the state, rather as a society of families, than of men. Let us suppose a nation composed of an hundred thousand men, divided into twenty thousand families of five persons each, including the head or master of the family, its representative. If it be an association of families, there will be twenty thousand men, and eighty thousand slaves; if of men, there will be an hundred thousand citizens, and not one slave. In the first case we behold a republic, and twenty thousand little monarchies, of which the heads are the sovereigns ”