THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 391 



on the part of the younger children and junior branches, who are 

 supposed to have a moral, if not a legal, interest in the land thus 

 alienated. It is true that where such things happen and such 

 things do happen the farmers and cottagers on the estate usu- 

 ally change masters for the better, and this fact points to what 

 is the inherent weakness of primogeniture, economically con- 

 sidered. It vests the control of property, wherever it prevails, not 

 in a series of hereditary landowners, but in a series of heredi- 

 tary life-tenants, or " limited owners " as they are now called, 

 without the full rights and sense of proprietorship, sometimes 

 heavily embarrassed, and almost always with a standard of unpro- 

 ductive expenditure more than commensurate with their means. 

 Let it be granted that somewhat undue stress has been laid on 

 this particular topic by some opponents of primogeniture, who 

 measure its economical defects by the whole difference between 

 the actual produce of England, and that which might be realised 

 if the entire area of the country, including the waste lands, were 

 brought into the very highest state of cultivation. Let it be 

 granted also that ancestral connection may count for something 

 against a superior command of capital available for agricultural 

 improvements, that rents are seldom excessive on settled estates, 

 and that, until the poor in country districts can be raised to 

 greater independence, they might often suffer by the substitu- 

 tion of strictly commercial relations for their present semi-feudal 

 connection with the family on whose property they are settled. 

 Still, we may confidently appeal to persons conversant with the 

 sale of land to confirm the inference deducible from the laws of 

 political economy, namely, that, in the majority of instances, when 

 land comes into the market, it passes from worse into better 

 hands, and that, consequently, so far as primogeniture artificially 

 obstructs free trade in land and saves the estates of spend- 

 thrifts from partition, it works a substantial injury to society. The 

 new purchaser may be comparatively ignorant of country life, 

 but he is not encumbered by rent-charges of indefinite duration, 

 by mortgages contracted to pay off his father's debts, by dynastic 

 traditions of estate-management, by the silly family pride which 

 must needs emulate the state of some richer predecessor, by the 



