THE 14TH EARL.

THE 14TH EARL. The article about the 35th generation running one English farm—and that this can be historically traced—reminded me of my reaction to an event in British politics some 50 years ago. I was still coming to grips with the comparative rootlessness of Americans and the brevity of American history. Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister of Britain in 1963 and Sir Alec Douglas-Home was chosen to replace him. This wikipedia article tells how it was felt that the Prime Minister should sit in the House of Commons rather than the House of Lords and so Douglas-Hume “disclaimed his earldom and associated lesser peerages” and won a safe seat in the House of Commons. The leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, attacked the Prime Minister as lacking the common touch. The article quotes Wilson: “‘After half a century of democratic advance, of social revolution, the whole process has ground to a halt with a fourteenth earl… Douglas-Home pooh-poohed this as inverted snobbery, and observed, ‘I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the fourteenth Mr Wilson.'”