Later Agrarian Legislation. 459 



rather lessened than increased the possibilities of disentailing. 

 Nor did the Thellusson Act, as we have seen in an earlier 

 chapter, affect the principle of the Family Settlement, which 

 is one of those practices with which the State lawyers are 

 loth to meddle until it is proved detrimental to the interests 

 of the community. 



Hardly a generation goes by without recourse being had to 

 a deed of re-settlement. If not when the eldest son comes 

 of age, at any rate when he marries, some such process is 

 required before he can provide for the maintenance of himself, 

 the fortune of his wife and the subsistence of future children. 

 The evidence before Pusey's Committee on Tenant Right in 

 1848, showed that more than two-thirds of the kingdom con- 

 sisted of estates under settlement, and Caird declared ^ that a 

 considerable portion of them were so heavily burdened by this 

 process that the means of improving the land were quite 

 beyond the reach of their owners. All farmers with capital 

 avoided such impoverished properties, which therefore came 

 under the cultivation of men whose meagre powers of im- 

 proving were on a par with those of their landlord. 



Besides the nominal master of a landed estate, there was 

 a plurality of owners, such as mortgagees, rent-charge re- 

 cipients, annuitants, jointresses, etc., who drew their incomes 

 from the rental, and very often the unfortunate squire retained 

 less than sufficient to defray the costs of management. In all 

 such cases, wherever there was a family, it was only natural 

 that every spare guinea should be put by for the future 

 support of the younger children, in preference to being ex- 

 pended in permanent improvements. 



Public opinion was (and is) strongly opposed to the practice 

 of family settlements, and many are the evils which the 

 advocates of a free trade in land imagine they see in it. 

 Thus, for example, they consider a custom which places a 

 young, inexperienced youth of twenty-one at the mercy of 

 his father, as little short of an outrage on public morals. 

 The " boy," it is said, joins his parent in an ante-nuptial 

 arrangement and signs away rights of inheritance the value 

 ^ English Agriculture, p. 53. J. Caird. 



