THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 403 



formerly shown to land by a legislature principally composed of 

 landowners still less to discuss the incidence of taxation upon 

 land as compared with personalty. There are very strong reasons 

 for objecting to complicated reservations of future interests in 

 personalty, and for doubting whether the efforts of the dead to 

 regulate the enjoyment of wealth by the living in the interest 

 of the unborn are sufficiently repressed by the rule against 

 perpetuities and the Thelusson Act. But these reasons have little 

 or nothing to do with the law and custom of primogeniture, 

 which must stand or fall by the peculiar claims and obligations 

 of real property. We are here concerned with the settlement of 

 land, and of land only ; nor is it difficult to show that land is, in 

 this regard, a thing sui generis, over which the State may and 

 ought to assume a control far more stringent than it would be 

 politic to assume, but not than it might rightfully assume, over 

 other kinds of property. The familiar arguments in support of 

 this position are derived from the fact that land is strictly limited 

 in quantity, at least within the borders of each kingdom, and that 

 its resources in a virgin State are not the production of human 

 industry. These arguments are so far valid as to rebut what does 

 not need to be rebutted the presumption of any binding analogy 

 between land and money. But the one decisive justification for 

 treating land as an entirely exceptional subject of property is to 

 be found in the entirely exceptional power which the possession of 

 it confers. If we contemplate the supreme influence wielded by 

 landowners collectively over the condition and especially over the 

 dwellings of the people, if we remember that upon their estate- 

 management depend the productiveness of the soil and the food- 

 supplies of the country, if we realise that not only is the land in a 

 physical sense " the leaf we feed on " but in a political sense the 

 substratum of our whole administrative machinery, we shall not fail 

 to perceive the full absurdity of postulating that it should be exactly 

 assimilated to stock in plasticity for the purposes of settlement 

 but not, forsooth, in facility of transfer, in the course of devolution 

 on intestacy, or in liability to probate and succession duties. 



The more thoroughly we appreciate the almost insuperable 

 difficulty of partially reforming an institution so deeply rooted 



