A CHAPTER ON LEGAL DEVELOPMENT. 809 



such a son, all the subsequent estates collapsed, because, upon the 

 ground already noticed, there could be no intermission, however 

 short, between the successive estates. So, in the case supposed, it 

 was possible for A, at any time, by his own act in voluntarily sur- 

 rendering his own life estate, to destroy the future estates sup- 

 ported by it. 



The great injustice and confusion of titles which flowed from 

 this feature of the law finally led to the device of designating in 

 cases of contingent future estates, trustees, in whom it was pro- 

 vided the estate should vest for the time being, in the event of 

 the determination of a prior estate, before the contingency had 

 happened, upon which the next succeeding estate was to take 

 effect. 



It was the livery of seisin which also set in motion and gave 

 direction to that curiously complicated succession of ideas and 

 legal devices which, during a period of more than four hundred 

 years, made up the eventful and withal romantic history of uses, 

 or, as they are now called, trusts a history which at one time or 

 another has had vital points of contact with nearly all the legal, 

 political, religious, and domestic relations of life. That which 

 made the use the nondescript but marvelously popular and mer- 

 curial thing that for centuries it was, was the tenacity with which 

 the common-law courts adhered to their doctrine that, because the 

 livery of seisin was not made to the beneficiary of a use, he took 

 nothing which could be regarded as property, or which could be 

 charged with the burdens or liabilities of property ; that in fact 

 " he had no more to do with the land than the merest stranger in 

 the world " ; while at the same time his every claim of control 

 over the land was regularly enforced by courts of equity. Again, 

 to the entanglement of the common law of possessions with the 

 equitable law of uses, which was brought about in the middle of 

 the sixteenth century through certain expressions in the statute 

 of uses, and which gave rise to such obscure questions as the 

 character of the seisin which was necessary under the statute to 

 feed or serve uses, are directly traceable the most subtle distinc- 

 tions of the law of springing and shifting uses and powers, words 

 which, though the unprofessional reader may not fully under- 

 stand, he may safely assume to stand, together with remainders, 

 for all that was and is most abstruse and intricate in our law. 



So it was the livery of seisin which, either directly, or indirectly 

 through the law of uses, gave color and form to all the methods 

 of conveyance, which through common-law devices or statutory 

 provision were by strangely circuitous methods gradually sub- 

 stituted for it in the transfer of lands. The impossibility of com- 

 pressing into this paper an adequate review of the developments 

 which our subject underwent in connection with uses and convey- 



