436 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



visions of our law of testament arc as false in principle as the 

 laws of entail and primogeniture. But if the first inquiry indi- 

 cates the nature of property in land, then the living men of any 

 generation have the moral right to declare who shall use the 

 land assigned by political or natural considerations to the 

 various states of the world, and also to announce, by a per- 

 petual decree, to whom or what the profits shall inure. This 

 doctrine, without limitation, can no where be defended. It 

 will be observed that I am not speaking of the transmission of 

 property from parent to child ; this is the natural and just 

 policy of the law, not the will of the original proprietor living 

 and acting after his death. The inquiry I submit, then, by 

 way of suggestion, is this : Ought the use and income of land to 

 be determined within certain limitations, for a term of years, or 

 without time, by the will of the present occupant, he not being 

 the state nor immortal, or by a general rule of public policy 

 which shall permit each generation, without revolution or vio- 

 lence, to use the land, and the income of the land in the way it 

 thinks fit ? The law, I submit, makes a distinction which has 

 no foundation in principle, when it allows a testator to 

 bequeath property to a corporation for a specific purpose for- 

 ever, and does not allow him to make a similar bequest to 

 those who are bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. 



But the distinction of the law may by some be defended upon 

 grounds of public policy. And it is agreed that a requisition 

 of public policy is a reason why an admitted principle should not 

 be universally applied. The wisdom of our ancestors is not 

 more marked in any thing than in the abolition of the rule of 

 primogeniture ; yet this rule has existed in many countries, — 

 Judea, Sparta and Great Britain, — and its advocates would find 

 something plausible now to say in its defence. We borrowed 

 our rule of descent mainly from Rome, but the Roman rule has 

 not everywhere been taken as wise public policy. Now, then, 

 our law says that it is bad policy to allow the eldest son to 

 inherit to the exclusion of his brethren. So we all say. But 

 the rule of primogeniture was not established, and does not 

 exist, without a reason. In feudal countries the law of primo- 

 geniture seems to have sprung naturally from the relations of 

 society required by feudalism. But these relations do not fur- 



