THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 367 



prevent its being covered with buildings, or because it lies 

 conveniently for his own agricultural designs, or because he 

 wants to extend his influence in the county ; for one or all of 

 which reasons it is worth more to him than to any one else. 

 It is known in some parts of the country that it is utterly vain 

 to bid against the great territorial lord of the district, whose 

 agent is instructed to buy up all properties for sale, regardless 

 of expense. In other parts of the country, men who have 

 made their fortunes in trade are equally covetous of land, which 

 for them is the one sure passport to social consideration, and 

 equally anxious to keep it together by entails. Thus by the 

 normal operation of supply and demand large estates are per- 

 petually swallowing up small estates, while, by a suspension of 

 that operation through the law and custom of primogeniture, 

 they are themselves preserved, to a great extent, from disso- 

 lution. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten that a 

 counter-tendency, no less natural and legitimate, partly neutral- 

 ises this gravitation of smaller towards larger aggregates of 

 land. The enormous rise in the value of all sites within easy 

 reach of great towns sometimes offers to great landowners an 

 inducement to sell which they cannot resist. In this way, 

 under the powers of sale already mentioned, distant and de- 

 tached portions of great estates are frequently passing in large 

 blocks into the hands of new landlords, generally of the mer- 

 cantile class, or are bought up by land-jobbers and sold, in 

 petty blocks, to retired tradesmen. At the same time, the 

 acquisition of minute plots by the working classes has been 

 facilitated of late by the agency of freehold-land societies, 

 originally established for political objects, and would doubtless 

 prevail to a much greater extent but for the exorbitance of law- 

 charges on small purchases of land. 



In default of authoritative statistics, the loosest and vaguest 

 conjectures were long current respecting the division of owner- 

 ship caused by these divergent tendencies. It was confidently 

 stated, for instance, that, whereas in the latter part of the last 

 century this country was divided among 200,000 landowners, 

 it had come to be divided among no more than 30,000. No 



