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in their position or rights as established by custom, 

 but to those rights having been ignored, and that 

 custom having been over-ridden. 



No one seems to have realised that the tenures of a 

 country are the outcome of its whole past history, 

 ever, as time rolled on, adjusting themselves to the 

 varying conditions and relations of the different 

 classes of the community. That they must necessarily, 

 therefore, be under the circumstances, those best suited 

 to the country ; that though they may require change 

 as these conditions and relations varv, it must be 



" Change that broadens slowly down from precedent to 

 precedent," 



and that any sudden and arbitrary, externally imposed, 

 change must, however noble the impulse that prompted 

 it, involve new and necessarily unsuitable combina- 

 tions. 



Human institutions to be healthy must grow where 

 they are to stand. 



Not so reasoned our predecessors. They gave a new 

 value to the land, by rigidly limiting their demand on 

 the soil — a good thing, quite in accordance with the 

 people's ideas of what a good prince should do, — and 

 they conferred partial proprietary rights (which no one 

 wanted or appreciated) wholesale, and they made all 

 the rights they created or acknowledged in the soil 

 transferable. 



Up to our time such rights as existed were entailed 

 in the strictest fashion ; creditors could not get hold 

 of the land, even during the lifetime of the debtor. 



