

NATURAL HEIRSHIP : OR, ALL THE WORLD AKIN. 385 



at that time. Every slave and every lord in the days of Julius Csesar 

 has contributed to our being, and, looking back to those times, each one 

 may consider himself not the child of a thin, thread-like line of parent- 

 age, but child of the race, son of all mankind. 



This subject has important bearings in the political realm. It in- 

 validates the basis of hereditary monarchy, and shows that it i-ests upon 

 a genealogical fiction. It is a depraved conventionalism, a custom born 

 of falsehood and of wrong to single out the eldest child or any other 

 child as the bearer of the honors and emoluments of the family to the 

 exclusion of the rest. All the children are equally partakers of the 

 parental nature. In the course of less than a thousand years the de- 

 scendants of an illustrious sovereign get strangely dispersed, and his 

 blood becomes mingled with the common reservoir of national life. 

 Every marriage outside his family runs off with half of what remained 

 of him in the succession. After being halved so often, the wearer of 

 his name and title, the possessor of his power, needs much faith or 

 much ignorance to believe that he is in any real sense the peculiar de- 

 scendant having a claim in nature beyond millions more. If the sov- 

 ereign is the descendant of William the Conqueror or of Alfred the 

 Great, so are the subjects. On the ground of hereditary succession 

 every man may claim to be king, and every woman to be queen. 



Hereditary aristocratic titles have no foundation in nature. They 

 are based upon deception and injustice, and at best are purely arbitary. 

 The eldest son who takes the title is no more the child than the rest of 

 the children. If any title is inherited it ought to be common to them 

 all, and, if the titular inheritance continued, it would be common to 

 all the population of the land in the course of a few ages. It is re- 

 stricted to one channel of descent under the delusion that this is more 

 direct and is somehow closer to the founder of the family than other 

 channels. The restriction takes place by means of a wrong done to 

 the rest in excluding them from that which is as much theirs by right 

 of nature as his who actually enjoys it. There could be no hereditary 

 aristocracy sav by the ignorance and weakness of the community at 

 large, who tolerate the presence of a few among them flaunting in 

 their eyes and jingling on their ears the tokens of the general depriva- 

 tion of a natural due. 



The doctrine of the close kinship of the nation practically carried 

 out would lead to a universal distribution of property. The verdict 

 of society is that a man who has property should leave it to his children 

 after making due provision for his wife for the remainder of her days. 

 This is the general rule which the common judgment of mankind pre- 

 scribes, leaving only a small margin for bequests outside the family 

 circle. Entail in its present form and primogeniture are doomed to go, 

 and only wait the hour and the man. Law has already relaxed the 

 grasp of the eldest son on pe7-sowa/ estate, and provides for its distribu- 

 tion. In France it compels an equal distribution of real estate among 



VOL. XXVIII. — 25 



