398 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



power whereby estates can be tied up for a life or lives in being, 

 and a period of twenty-one years afterwards. Both of these 

 schemes purport to promote free trade in land and to check its 

 aggregation in the hands of an exclusive aristocracy : the former, 

 by constantly and forcibly breaking up properties into fragments, 

 easily saleable ; the latter, by prohibiting or curtailing the limita- 

 tions which prevent their coming into the market. Thus, both 

 involve an abridgment of the liberty now enjoyed by English 

 settlors and testators, but with this important difference, that 

 whereas the one scheme would only abridge the liberty of a 

 bygone generation to control the action of the living generation, 

 the other is directly at variance with full individual proprietorship. 

 Under the French system of enforced partible succession the 

 property of each citizen is rigidly settled, with the exception of a 

 fixed disposable portion, but the settlement is made by the State, 

 instead of by himself, and therefore without regard to peculiar 

 family circumstances. The causes which facilitated the intro- 

 duction of this great legal revolution into France have been 

 explained by MM. de Tocqueville and Lavergne, and Mr. Cliffe 

 Leslie has done much to repel the objections, both social and 

 agricultural, which have been persistently urged against it in this 

 country. It is a remarkable fact that no French government, 

 whether Legitimist, Orleanist, Imperial, or Republican, has ever 

 attempted to reverse it ; nor can we fail to be struck by the 

 opinion so generally expressed in the reports above cited, that 

 in countries which have borrowed this article of the Code 

 Napoleon it is believed to work beneficially. On the other hand, 

 it is not less significant that no practical English statesman has 

 ever advocated its adoption and that even those English theorists 

 who have least sympathy with the rights of property have appar- 

 ently no great partiality for- the agrarian constitution of France 

 and Belgium. Their ideal is not the infinite disintegration of 

 landed property among peasant owners, which they would regard 

 as a retrograde measure, but, on the contrary, its concentration 

 in the hands of one national land commission, or a number of 

 municipal land commissions, under whom private individuals, if 

 allowed to call any land their own, must be content to hold 



