ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the truth of Mills assertion that the aristocracy was merely takers from the rest of the community. Mill was a philosopher and a political economist who wrote much on the nature of government and about legitimate sources of power. Scottish and Irish peers were generally considered to be of lower status and were, for the most part, considerably less wealthy. The apex of British society, therefore, was occupied by men of substantial property and extraordinary wealth. Aristocratic families needed to be urban developers, especially in London. In the early nineteenth century, the work of the landscape gardener Humphry Repton and the architect John Nash was particularly prominent in and around London. The political power of the aristocracy was dominant throughout the eighteenth century and almost all of the nineteenth. A House of Commons dominated by large landowners was in a strong position to determine the outcome of the many so-called private members bills which came before it.
