THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 381 



since have been merged in the mass of the community. Ex- 

 cept where the law steps in, on intestacy, to defeat the known 

 intentions of a father, or a father disappoints the hopes en- 

 couraged by himself to aggrandise an eldest son, it can hardly 

 be said that primogeniture involves injustice to younger children. 

 Whatever injustice it may involve is sustained by society at 

 large, and though society consists of individual members, those 

 of its members who ultimately suffer most by the operation of 

 primogeniture are certainly not to be found in families which 

 owe their existence to it. 



Still more irrelevant are the attacks which have recently been 

 made on primogeniture from a communistic point of view. 

 Communistic theories of property, if valid at all, are valid not 

 against any particular rule of succession, but against individual 

 proprietorship as such or against the ample and peculiar rights 

 of English landlords rights of which no proprietary class is 

 more tenacious than new purchasers. No doubt it is a perfectly 

 intelligible proposition that all the land in the kingdom ought to 

 be " nationalised " and placed under public management, because 

 individual owners cannot be trusted with full dominion over that 

 part of the earth's surface by which and upon which all natives 

 of England must live unless they choose to emigrate. It is 

 evident that, apart from all other objections, this doctrine is the 

 very negation of the belief in peasant-proprietorship and "the 

 magic of property," being, in fact, an essentially urban senti- 

 ment and inevitably destructive to all independence of rural life. 

 Nor can it be said that our experience of corporate administra- 

 tion, in the case of lands held by collegiate, ecclesiastical, and 

 municipal bodies, as well as by trustees of charities, is such as 

 to recommend the substitution of public for private ownership 

 on a much grander scale. At the same time it is incontestable 

 that land has actually been treated by all governments, not 

 excluding our own, as more within State control, for many 

 purposes, than other kinds of property ; and it is possible to 

 conceive circumstances under which it might be expedient to 

 extend State control much further over the soil of these islands. 

 But what has all this to do with the right of primogeniture, 



