THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 407 



himself to some profession or business, and endeavour to increase, 

 instead of diminishing, his future patrimony. In such cases, the 

 position of the younger children would be very much what it is 

 under the present system, during the parent's life ; but even in 

 such cases, and still more in cases where hereditary traditions 

 were less powerful, the father would seldom think himself jus- 

 tified in leaving them a mere fraction of the property at his 

 disposal, and would often direct his outlying estates to be divided 

 among them or sold for their benefit. In these ways land would 

 be constantly " passing out of the family," and though some 

 might be left back to it by childless uncles, the unity of family 

 properties would be greatly and progressively impaired. More- 

 over, now and then a spendthrift who ought to have been dis- 

 inherited would be allowed to succeed by a too indulgent father, 

 and might gamble away in a year the purchases and improve- 

 ments of many generations. This being the contingency which 

 settlements on the eldest son are specially designed to prevent, 

 and the occurrence of which is represented by the friends of 

 primogeniture as an unmitigated calamity, it may be well to 

 pause for a moment, and observe both what it does and what it 

 does not involve. 



That it does not involve any destruction or even any '" dis- 

 sipation " of the land itself is so obvious that nothing but the 

 persistent use of confused metaphors could have obscured it. 

 Money, or money's worth, can be eaten, drunk, thrown into the 

 sea, or otherwise literally consumed in unproductive expenditure, 

 but a fortune consisting of land can only be squandered in the 

 sense of being transferred from the dominion of one man into 

 that of another or several others, which may happen to be the 

 best thing which can befall the soil and all who live upon it. 

 Considering the enormous injury done to any estate by the life 

 incumbency of one insolvent not to say, one absentee pro- 

 prietor, as well as the well-known tendency of families to degen- 

 erate after one such disgraceful interregnum, the burden of proof 

 certainly lies upon those who hold that, in such an event, the 

 greatest happiness of the greatest number is promoted by keeping 

 it undivided and inalienable, lest an ancient feudal name should 



