102 Timehri. 
object very laudable in itself but which will not appeal to men of affairs as 
readily as considerations of practical convenience. Has our law as 
it stands at present the essential quality of being readily and definitely 
ascertained by lawyers and Judges even if, like the law nearly every- 
where else, itis an esoteric study to the man in the street 2? Most 
emphatically it has not. Mr. Dalton himself has cunclusively shown that the 
remnant of Roman-Dutch law in this colony creates hopeless confusion in 
minds trained to think only in the English terms as to contracts, sale of goods, 
warranty, and other elementary features of commercial life. He might also 
have taken quite another department of its activity and have referred to the 
astounding result produced by the piecemeal efforts to reconcile the Roman- 
Dutch law as to husband and wife with more modern ideas. Community of 
goods (a Teutonic not a Roman institution grafted upon the earlier law during 
the Middle Ages) was abolished by the Married Persons’ Property Ordinance, 
1904. So far as the statute law serves as a guide, the surviving spouse for the 
next five years became a stranger, and inherited nothing not left by will. With 
the question of the claims ot the fisc I will not deal at all. The problem is 
already complicated enough. By the Deceased Persons’ Estates Ordinance, 
1909 the surviving spouse inherits one-half on intestacy 2f there are no children 
or grandchildren. If a wife has done her duty to the community and to her 
husband, or if there are children of another marriage, the statute law ignores 
her as regards his estate. If the husband is the survivor he also is ignored. 
But perhaps the common law may come to the rescue or did the abolition of 
the community in 1904 dispose utterly of the application of any common 
law right ? The answer will turn on the measure of that Judge’s foot who will 
first have the painful task of attempting to find a path through that labyrinth 
of black-letter law. At present we can only give a guess. The colony was 
blessed with the luxury of no less than two of the many Roman-Dutch methods 
of intestate succession, which in their turn were complicated by modifications, 
the extent of which is at present undecided. Only Bynkershoek or Voet or 
Sandé or Groenewegen could fully explain the position. Demerara and Esse- 
quebo have the New Aasdom’s Law of North Holland, a creation of 1599 by 
Placaat. Berbice has the New Schependom’s Law of 1580, a Political Ordi- 
nance embodying in the main the existing common law of South Holland. 
If the other common law rights outside of community remain unaffected by 
the statutes and Professor Lee in his article in the Journal of the Society of 
Comparative Legislation for May, 1912, is inclined to that presumption, a sur- 
viving spouse in Demerara and Essequebo will succeed to the whole of the 
deceased intestate’s estate in default of all relations by blood. In Berbice 
there is no such right under its ordinary law, but the matter does not end 
there. The legislator was at work on the improvement of that law as early 
as the 17th century. 
In 1890 the problem of Berbice was considered in Ex parte Administrator 
General re Estate of Alexander but as the intestate was unmarried it did not 
decide what are the rights of a surviving spouse. It decided only that in Ber- 
bice the surviving parent, in case there are surviving brothers and sisters, 
takes one-half, the brothers and sisters taking the other half in equal shares, 
