xvi HOW TO NATIONALIZE THE LAND 269 



The right to transfer land (or other property) by will, 

 to any successor not insane or criminal, has been allowed 

 by most civilized nations to some extent, and by ourselves 

 with hardly any limitations. A British landowner may 

 leave his property to be divided among his family, or to 

 any single member of his family. If he has no family he 

 may leave it to any relation or to any friend; and he 

 is not said to be unjust if he passes over many of his 

 relatives and bequeaths his land either to a personal 

 friend, or to some man of eminence, or to benefit some 

 public institution or charity, or for any analogous purpose. 

 Even his own immediate family his sons and daughters, 

 his parents, or his brothers have no legal claim on his 

 land, if he chooses to leave it to a more distant relation, 

 or to a friend, or to a charity ; but public opinion does, in 

 such a case, condemn his action as more or less unjust. 

 But whenever the choice is between remote relations and 

 some public purpose or even personal friendship, public 

 opinion rather applauds his freedom of choice, and it is 

 never allowed that the more or less distant relatives who 

 may be passed over have any right to complain of injury 

 or robbery because the land was not left to them, even if 

 they were the actual heirs-at-law and would have received 

 it had the owner died intestate. 



Now comes the first application of my above-stated 

 proposition or axiom. If the personal owner of land does 

 not rob or injure a distant relative (even if he be the 

 heir-at-law) by making a will and otherwise disposing of 

 his land, neither can the State be justly said to rob or 

 injure any one if, for public purposes, it alters the 

 law of inheritance so as to prevent the transfer of the 

 land of intestates to any persons who are not near blood 

 relations of the deceased. The exact degree of relation- 

 ship that may be fixed upon is not of importance to the 

 principle, except that it must not be so narrowly limited 

 as to interfere with what Bentham termed "just expec- 

 tation." A son or a brother certainly has such just 

 expectations, while the expectations of a third cousin or a 

 great-grand-nephew can hardly be so termed. For the 

 sake of illustrating the principle, let us suppose that the 



