162 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



that the intention was to maintain the religion of the 

 country, whatever that might be, then the revenues 

 should be fairly divided among all existing sects for the 

 time being, — but that is " concurrent endowment," and is 

 almost universally repudiated. The only consistent, and 

 it is maintained the only true, view, is, that dead men 

 should have no influence (beyond their personal influence 

 on their friends) other than what is due to the intrinsic 

 value of their opinions ; and that property cannot be left 

 in trust to carry out dead men's wishes, on the common- 

 sense ground that the living know better what is good 

 for themselves than the dead can do, and that the latter 

 have no just or reasonable claim to coerce a society to 

 which they no longer belong. To hold the contrary view 

 is, practically, to allow men to continue to be the 

 possessors of property after they are dead, and to give 

 more weight to the injunctions of those who had no 

 possible means of knowing what is best for us now, than 

 we give to the deliberate convictions of men who still live 

 among us and who have made our welfare their life-long 

 study. 



The dead are not truly honoured by sacrificing the 

 interests of the living to their old-world schemes ; and if, 

 as we may reasonably suppose, the future state is one of 

 progress, at least as rapid as that which obtains on earth, 

 it may be that they are afflicted with unavailing regrets 

 at our blindness in insisting on being guided by the 

 feeble and uncertain light which they once had the 

 presumption to imagine would for ever be sufficient to 

 illuminate the world. 



Dehtor and Creditor. 



Another group of property cases which occupy the time 

 of the courts even more largely than wills and trusts, are 

 those connected with the recovery of debts of various kinds, 

 culminating in the proceedings of the Bankruptcy Courts. 

 Here again, in by far the larger portion of the cases, there 

 is no necessity whatever for the law to intervene, while 

 it is not improbable that its total abstention would in 



