396 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



favourable to younger sons than in the rest of the island. Others 

 believe that a deliberate reversal of the policy hitherto sanctioned 

 by the legislature would exert a powerful influence on popular 

 sentiment, and, coupled with the direct operation of the new law, 

 would leave a very sensible impression on the rural economy of 

 England within two or three generations. In support of this 

 belief, it may be urged that, in a vast number of cases, the form 

 of settlements and wills is practically dictated by the solicitors 

 who frame them, and who themselves follow, more or less exactly 

 and more or less consciously, the course prescribed by the law 

 on intestacy. A man informs his solicitor that he knows little of 

 legal phrases, but that he wishes to settle his property strictly in 

 the usual and right manner ; upon which the solicitor makes a will, 

 giving all the land to his eldest son, and dividing the personalty, 

 if any, among his widow and children, nearly in accordance with 

 the Statute of Distributions. So close is the correspondence of 

 the custom of the law, that whereas, in default of sons, the law 

 vests the land in all the daughters and not in the eldest daughter 

 only, the same rule is adopted, with very slight variation, in most 

 wills and settlements of realty. Were the law altered, however, 

 and especially were it altered after a thorough discussion of the 

 whole question, the uniformity of these usages would be effectu- 

 ally broken. Solicitors would feel bound to ask for more precise 

 instructions from their clients ; testators and settlors would more 

 fully realise their responsibility ; and the dispositions of landed 

 property hitherto embodied in the common forms of conveyances 

 would have to be reconsidered by the light of modern idt-as. 

 Here and there an old property would devolve to several children 

 under the law of intestacy, and yet would be kept in the family 

 by means of such fraternal arrangements as are made every day 

 on the Continent. A few instances of this kind would go far to 

 dispel prejudices against equal partition, while, in the case of 

 properties to which no family sentiment attaches, directions to sell 

 and divide the proceeds in specified proportions could hardly fail 

 to supersede, by their superior convenience, the plan of devising 

 to one child and charging portions for all the rest. Indirectly, 

 therefore, the mere assimilation of real to personal estate, on 





