392 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



passion for political dictation to which the refusal of leases is so 

 frequently due, or by the supposed necessity of satisfying the sup- 

 posed expectations of the neighbourhood. Having no liabilities 

 of a past generation to discharge, he can make a liberal provision 

 for younger children out of his rental, by way of life insurance or 

 otherwise ; and if this should not suffice with such addition as 

 he may be able to make from invested funds, there is nothing 

 to prevent his leaving them portions of the estate or directing 

 portions to be sold for their benefit. Meanwhile, he is master of 

 his own property and free to develop its resources without 

 feeling that he is either compromising or unjustly enriching an 

 eldest son. 



This brings us back to what may be called the domestic aspect 

 of primogeniture ; that is, to its influence upon the happiness 

 and welfare of the households immediately affected by it. Apart 

 from the question whether upon other grounds it is expedient, 

 in the interest of the State, to perpetuate a landed aristocracy, 

 we have to consider the question whether the English institution 

 of primogeniture conduces to family peace and virtuous conduct 

 within that aristocracy. This is a question which has been very 

 fully discussed by Mr. Locke King and Mr. Neate, the latter of 

 whom specially insists on the humiliating and unbecoming posi- 

 tion in which the father as life-tenant is placed towards the eldest 

 son, as tenant-in-tail in remainder. "It is a hard thing," he 

 says, " for a father to have to confess and excuse his extravagance 

 to a son, or to justify his desire for a second wife. It is a worse 

 thing for a son to judge of his father's excuses, or to decide vir- 

 tually, as head of the family, whether it is right that his father 

 should be allowed to marry again." Yet this is but one of the 

 forms in which our system of entails operates to sow discord and 

 undutiful feeling in families. Long before the heir to a great 

 estate emerges from boyhood, he is made aware that his fortune 

 does not depend on his father's will or his own deserts. He soon 

 learns to consider the estate as his, subject only to his father's 

 life-interest, and expects to receive an allowance making him to 

 live in idleness, so that a double burden is laid upon the land 

 for the support of two establishments yielding no agricultural 



