THE LAW AND CUSTOM OF PRIMOGENITURE 405 



saved from morcellement at the expense of the proprietary inter- 

 est, which is dissected, split up, and parcelled out into more 

 shares than a French lawyer would think possible. This process 

 is repeated in each generation by a family compact between 

 father and eldest son, in which no other member of the family 

 has any voice, yet neither of the parties is truly a free agent or 

 in a position to reverse the self-renewing dispensation of which 

 they are little more than instruments, and no single person can 

 be identified as the author. Now let us assume that, due provi- 

 sion being made for vested interests, all this ingenious network 

 of particular estates, as they are technically called, were swept 

 away by law, and that every acre of English soil belonged abso- 

 lutely to some assignable owner. Let us, further, picture to our- 

 selves a case in which the operation of the change would be most 

 severely tested the case of an heir succeeding to a family 

 property strictly entailed by its original purchaser and held 

 together for centuries by settlements in the eldest male line, but 

 finding himself at perfect liberty to sell it or devise it as he 

 pleases. This is a case, be it remarked, which, but for the 

 practice of re-settlement, would occur daily under the present 

 system, and does occur sometimes, when the eldest son obsti- 

 nately refuses to commute his estate-tail for a life-estate. It will 

 hardly be disputed that a landowner so circumstanced has a more 

 enviable lot, with greater inducements and greater power to do 

 his estate and all connected with it full justice, than if he were 

 the mere creature of a settlement, but it may be imagined that 

 his gain is more than counterbalanced by some loss elsewhere. 

 Where, then, is this loss, and who is it that suffers by the sub- 

 stitution of ownership for life-tenancy in the case supposed ? 

 Not, surely, his ancestors, who, having brought nothing into the 

 world, could not carry anything out, and whose memory it would 

 be superstitious to personify. Not his wife or younger children, 

 whom he is now enabled to endow according to his own convic- 

 tions of justice, instead of according to a standard determined 

 by the paramount claims of primogeniture, before his marriage, 

 if not before his birth. Not his eldest son, who, by the hypoth- 

 esis, must have come into the world, or at least emerged from 



