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THE POPULAR SCIEXCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than 

 the love of aristocracy." Mr. Gladstone goes on 

 to quote a saying of Sir William Molesworth, 

 that with our people the love of aristocracy "is 

 a religion." And he concludes in his copious 

 and eloquent way : " Call this love of inequality 

 by what name you please — the complement of the 

 love of freedom, or its negative pole, or the shad- 

 ow which the love of freedom casts, or the re- 

 verberation of its voice in the halls of the con- 

 stitution — it is an active, living, and life-giving 

 power, which forms an inseparable essential ele- 

 ment in our political habits of mind, and asserts 

 itself at every step in the processes of our sys- 

 tem." 



And yet, on the other side, we have a consum- 

 mate critic of life like Menander, delivering, as if 

 there were no doubt at all about the matter, the 

 maxim, " Choose equality ! " An Englishman 

 with any curiosity must surely be inclined to ask 

 himself how such a maxim can ever have got es- 

 tablished, and taken rank along with "Evil com- 

 munications corrupt good manners." Moreover, 

 we see that among the French, who have suffered 

 so grievously, as we hear, from choosing equal- 

 ity, the most gifted spirits continue to believe 

 passionately in it nevertheless. " The human 

 ideal, as well as the social ideal, is," says George 

 Sand, " to achieve equality." She calls equality 

 " the goal of man and the law of the future." 

 She asserts that France is the most civilized of 

 nations, and that its preeminence in civilization 

 it owes to equality. 



But Menander lived a long while ago, and 

 George Sand was an enthusiast. Perhaps their 

 differing from us about equality need not trouble 

 us much. France, too, counts for but one nation, 

 as England counts for one, also. Equality may 

 be a religion with the people of France, as in- 

 equality, we are told, is a religion with the people 

 of England. But what do other nations seem to 

 think about the matter ? Now this is most cer- 

 tainly not a lecture on law and the rules of be- 

 quest. But it is evident that in the societies of 

 Europe, with a constitution of property such as 

 that which the feudal middle age left them with 

 — a constitution of property full of inequality — 

 the state of the law of bequest shows us how far 

 each society wishes the inequality to continue. 

 The families in possession of great estates will 

 not break them up if they can help it. The own- 

 ers will do all they can, by entail and settlement, 

 to prevent their successors from breaking them 

 up. They will preserve inequality. Freedom of 

 bequest, then, the power of making entails and 



settlements, is sure, in an old European country 

 like ours, to maintain inequality. And with us, 

 who have the religion of inequality, the power of 

 entailing and settling, and of willing property as 

 one likes, exists, as is well known, in singular full- 

 ness — greater fullness than in any country of the 

 Continent. The proposal of a measure such as 

 the Real Estates Intestacy Bill is, in a country 

 like ours, perfectly puerile. A European country 

 like ours, wishing not to preserve inequality but 

 to abate it, can only do so by interfering with the 

 freedom of bequest. This is what Turgot, the 

 wisest of French statesmen, pronounced before 

 the Revolution to be necessary, and what was 

 done in France at the great Revolution. The 

 Code Napoleon, the actual law of Fiance, forbids 

 entails altogether, and leaves a man free to dis- 

 pose of but one-fourth of his property, of what- 

 ever kind, if he have three children or more, of 

 one-third if he have two children, of one-half if 

 he have but one child. Only in the rare case, 

 therefore, of a man's having but one child, can 

 that child take the whole of his father's property. 

 If there are two children, two-thirds of the prop- 

 eity must be equally divided between them; if 

 there are more than two, three-fourths. In this 

 way has France, desiring equality, sought to bring 

 equality about. 



Now the interesting point for us is, I say, to 

 know how far other European communities, left 

 in the same situation with us and France, having 

 immense inequalities of class and property created 

 for them by the middle age, have dealt with these 

 inequalities by means of the law of bequest. Do 

 they leave bequest free, as we do ? then, like us, 

 they are for inequality. Do they interfere with 

 the freedom of bequest, as France does ? then, 

 like France, they are for equality. And we shall 

 be most interested, surely, by what the most civil- 

 ized European communities do in this matter — 

 communities such as those of Germany, Italy, 

 Belgium, Holland, Switzerland. And among those 

 communities we are most concerned, I think, with 

 such as, in the conditions of freedom and of self- 

 government which they demand for their life, are 

 most like ourselves. Germany, for instance, we 

 shall less regard, because the conditions which 

 the Germans seem to accept for their life are so 

 unlike what we demand for ours ; there is so much 

 personal government there, so much junJcerism, 

 militarism, officialism ; the community is so much 

 more trained to submission than we could bear, 

 so much more used to be, as the popular phrase 

 is, sat upon. Countries where the community has 

 more a will of its own, or can more show it, are 



