F._ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 133 



he knows that nothing, or only a small share, is due to him, then Bentham 

 claimed that he would feel no hardship, ' for hardship depends on dis- 

 appointment, disappointment upon expectation, and if the law of 

 succession leaves him nothing, he will not expect anything.' 



Prof. Seligman remarks that, exaggerated as Bentham'a idea and 

 distinction undoubtedly was, it contained a kernel of truth — namely, that 

 there is no such thing as a natural right of inheritance, and that the 

 extension of intestate succession to collateral relatives is, under existing 

 social conditions, defensible only to a very limited extent. Graduation 

 of the tax according to the degree of relationship was the definite corollary 

 of his ideas. The idea of the basis of taxation described as the theory of 

 copartnership originated later, when writers combined with Bentham's 

 argument the thought that the State should inherit property from 

 individuals because of what it does for them during their lives.* Andrew 

 Carnegie, the millionaire, was an enthusiastic advocate of this idea. I 

 am not concerned with the socialist or ' diffusion of wealth ' theory, 

 based upon the doctrine that it is a proper function of Government to 

 use the power of taxation as an engine of social improvement, to stop the 

 growth of large fortunes and bring about an equal distribution of wealth. 

 Here it is necessary to remark that those defences of inheritance which 

 rest upon the family theory of property are not altogether consistent 

 with that kind of freedom of bequest which is commonly found in English- 

 speaking countries. In Continental Europe, of course, the ' legitime,' 

 and in the United States some of the State laws providing for a 

 certain portion of the estate to go, in a definite direction, to near relatives, 

 make for a better support of the family theory. Seligman says that most 

 thinkers, as well as the mass of the public, would still to-day maintain 

 the custom of inheritance, not, indeed, as a natural right or necessary 

 constituent in theory of private property, but as an institution that is, 

 on the whole, socially desirable. Those who are not prepared to accept 

 socialistic methods of reasoning cannot acknowledge the validity of the 

 ' diffusion of wealth ' argument. 



Other economists have discussed the question almost entirely as one 

 of ' social justice,' and in so doing have often begged the question of its 

 economic effects without examination. 



John Stuart Mill held the view that there was nothing implied in 

 property ' but the right of each to his own faculties, to what he could 

 produce by them and to whatever he could get for them in a fair market, 

 together with his right to give this to any other person that he chooses, 

 and the right of that other person to receive and enjoy it.' He thought 

 that it followed that, although the right of bequest or gift after death 

 formed part of the idea of property, the right of inheritance, as distinguished 

 from bequest, did not. The succession, in the absence of disposition, by 

 children or near relatives, might be a proper arrangement, but he agreed 

 that there were many other considerations besides those of political 

 economy which entered into it. He traced in antiquity a definite economic 

 factor, where the disposition of the property -otherwise than to the family 

 surrounding it and interested in it had the effect of breaking up a little 

 commonwealth, united by ideas, interests, and habits, and casting them 

 ' Vide Max West : The Inheritanee Tax. 



