The Land from the Citizens Standpoint. 399 



say that such statutes have given a new lease of life to the 

 customs of primogeniture and entails. 



In this direction, therefore, we find no pronounced attitude 

 taken up by the Party of Progress during the earlier decades 

 of the nineteenth century, Land Law reform forty years ago 

 had been confined, as far as regards the exterior of Westminster 

 to the pages of the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, 

 within Parliament to motions for the abolition of the property 

 qualification of members in 1837, for the compensation of the 

 off-going tenant in 1845, and for the abrogation of the custom 

 of primogeniture in 1837. Though defeated by large majorities 

 in every case, the Radicals, both in 1850 and 1855, renewed 

 with equal want of success their agitation against the law ol 

 intestacy. 



But that the feeling of the country on this subject of entails 

 was not altogether benevolent is evidenced by its attitude 

 in the Thellusson case, which occupied the attention of the 

 courts from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle 

 of the nineteenth. A certain Peter Thellusson, a banker 

 by profession, a Frenchman by birth, died in 1797 at his 

 seat, the Manor of Brodsworth, in Yorkshire, which he had 

 recently purchased firom the archbishop of that county. He 

 seems to have been possessed of realty in Brodsworth, 

 Plaistow, and London, valued at £175,000, and personalty 

 at considerably over half a million.^ To his wife and six 

 children he bequeathed moneys amounting in all to £100,000, 

 but his large estates in Yorkshire and the bulk of his fortune 

 he left in the hands of trustees to accumulate and be laid 

 out in the purchase of estates in England until all his 

 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, if in exist- 

 ence or in ventre sa mere before his decease, were dead. The 

 curious delighted in estimating the utmost limit that this 

 colossal fortune might reach, finding that if, as was possible, 

 the trust did not terminate for 120 years, the total value of 

 the property would then amount to 140 millions sterling. In 



to the Board of Agriculture, and the rate of interest payable for com- 

 pensation still further reduced. 



1 Gentleman's Magazine, July. 1797, pp. 621, 708, and Dec., 1798, p. 1082. 



