4o6 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



childhood, after the alteration in the law, and would have been 

 educated in the full knowledge that his birthright, if any, was at 

 the disposal of his father. Not any more distant relatives, whose 

 interest in family estates, unless vested, is usually most shadowy 

 and delusive. Not unborn descendants, who might possibly 

 inherit if the entail were perpetually renewed, under the present 

 law, but who are equally with the dead beyond the reach of 

 appreciable injury. In short, we strive in vain to discover any 

 specific individual, either in esse or in posse, who could be 

 aggrieved by the legal extinction of life-estates and estates-tail, 

 under proper conditions of time. Still it may be said that 

 "families," that is, territorial families, would sooner or later 

 cease to exist without the artificial safeguard of complex settle- 

 ments, and that such a result would prejudice not only the 

 happiness of their members in all succeeding generations, but 

 the welfare of all the rural communities grouped around them, 

 and even of the nation at large. And thus we are led back to a 

 point of view from which the actual results of family settlements 

 have already been estimated, and from which it may now be 

 useful to forecast the probable results of the alternative system. 



The first, and not the least salutary, of these would be the 

 strengthening of parental authority in those families where it is 

 most needed. The father is, upon the whole, a wiser lawgiver 

 and a more impartial judge within his own domestic circle than 

 any providence of human institution, whether it be embodied 

 in a lifeless deed or in a lifeless statute ; and, as Mr. Locke 

 King justly remarks, "if such a disposer of property did not 

 exist, we should only be too happy to discover such a being." 

 Invested with full dominion over his landed estate, the head 

 of each family would no longer have any cause to be jealous of 

 his eldest son, or feel bound to maintain him in idleness during 

 the best years of his life. Doubtless there would still be a strong 

 disposition in most representatives of old hereditary properties 

 to leave the eldest son, if not unworthy, the principal family do- 

 main, with the bulk of the land ; but since he would depend, like 

 his younger brothers, upon his father's award, and could not 

 raise money upon his expectations, he would, like them, betake 



