DESCENT OF LAND. 435 



and vest lands in these creatures of the law, and if the general 

 rule of distribution was inflexible, our system of titles could not 

 be amended. The conclusion is, that justice requires that those 

 who receive lands should pay, but that it is true policy by low 

 prices to induce citizens to become freeholders. 



We have no laws of entail or primogeniture in this country, 

 but the two evils I have suggested are so near to those laws in 

 principle, and so well calculated to work out similar results, 

 that I think them worthy of consideration when we notice the 

 influence of tenures and titles upon the agricultural interests of 

 Massachusetts. The nature of the titles by which men or cor- 

 porations hold land is not important to the present generation; 

 but we ought to consider that Massachusetts is even yet in her 

 infancy ; that land is not valued here as in many parts of the 

 world, and that every obstacle to its free sale and transfer will 

 hereafter be accounted an evil. But I desire, gentlemen, that 

 what I am about to say shall be received as suggestion rather 

 than as opinion or argument. 



And in this view, my first suggestion relates to what appears 

 to be the extraordinary power of persons, by will or testa- 

 ment, to control estates after their own decease. And first, 

 the law which permits this, does not seem to be founded upon 

 any principle. We allow a person to provide, by will, that a 

 particular estate shall vest, at his death, in a corporation ex- 

 isting or created for that object, and that the rent shall be 

 applied forever to some eleemosynary or other similar pur- 

 pose. The existence of such a power implies absolute prop- 

 erty in land, equally as if we allowed a man to bequeath the 

 income of his estates to his eldest son, and so on, by the rule 

 of primogeniture, for ever. But we have admitted the former 

 power, and refused the latter. I see not, I confess, why we 

 should permit either. Upon principle, then, can we find a 

 reason why the entailment of the income of estates, which is 

 the whole estate when the entailment is perpetual, should be 

 permitted in one class of cases and not in others ? 



Let us consider the right which a man can acquire in land. Is 

 it an absolute, unqualified property in and control over it ? Or 

 is it, rather, the right to use it during his life ? If the latter, 

 (and I have the honor to suggest that it is,) some of the pro- 



