390 History of the English Landed Interest. 



economists of tlie Manchester school constantly endeavonrecl to 

 persnacle the husbandman that their proposal of a free trade in 

 grain affected not his pocket, but the landlord's. 



No doubt, to the commercial man, the most distasteful 

 feature about the Land was still, as it had been all along, the 

 hereditary sj^stem. The law of intestate succession, in other 

 words, the law that, in the event of an owner of realty dying 

 without having made a will, his landed estates should become 

 the property of his next male-of-kin in order of primogeniture, 

 interfered with that freedom of barter which is so essential in a 

 commercial country. It was contrary to all the traditions of 

 the town capitalist, who seldom or never made his eldest son 

 heir of his personalty, and who merely saw in this practice 

 of landed capitalists an artificial effort to retain the social 

 supremacy of countj^ families over those of his own class. 

 The fact, however, that primogeniture is a custom, not a law, 

 and that every man has a right to do what he likes with his 

 own, so long as the interests of the community do not suffer, 

 rendered the landlord almost invulnerable. The legislature had 

 rightly evinced the greatest reluctance to interfere with vested 

 interests, unless it could have been clearly proved that they 

 were disadvantageous to the common weal. We shall now pro- 

 ceed to show that it was impossible for the commercial classes 

 to have deduced any such disadvantage from the case in point. 



It has been often asserted that the instances where the law of 

 primogeniture operates are so very few that its abolition would 

 have little effect on the landed property market. No great 

 landlords, it would be thought, are so heartless and careless as 

 to omit entirely, or perform inadequately, a process which 

 might leave their nearest and dearest entirely beholden to the 

 charity of another, even though that other might be a beloved 

 son. We shall not use such an assertion in favour of our 

 contention; because if the records where intestacy has oc- 

 curred from various causes • could be collated and searched, 

 we believe that few landed estates would be found which had 

 not some time or other come under the operation of the law of 

 intestate succession. But we do maintain that nothing short 

 of a penal statute would put an end to a })roccdure which has 



