for the one reason that personalty is not so important as land, to produce nearly as great evils as are now complained of in the case of land. It has happened to me, and happens now and again to every conveyancer, to trace the title to Consols settled so cunningly that the right to their enjoyment followed closely the right to settled land. In such a case, the investigation of title is nearly as onerous as the investigation of title to land. With regard to personalty, people are better and wiser than the Law compels them to be, and they do not tie it up, even in favour of the first generation of unborn children, with anything approaching the same frequency or the same extent as they tie up their land. If the case were otherwise, and if it had come about that a very large portion of the Consols, the Stocks of Railway and other trading Companies, the money secured on mortgage, the ships, the merchandize, and the stock-in-trade of the country were so entangled in trusts created by the Dead in favour of the Unborn that it could not be freely handled according to the necessities or convenience of the Living, and so had become concentrated in a very small number of persons, I should now be writing to advocate Free Personalty as the most crying need of the day.

79. It has been objected to the plan of prohibiting gifts to the unborn that it does not sufficiently curtail the powers of testators or settlors to govern the distant future. It is suggested that a man desirous of acting on the "Te teneam moriens" principle, and of prolonging his power into futurity, may still create an immense number of life estates and suspend the vesting of the inheritance until the longest of those lives is spent. The answer is that, though such a thing might be done, there would be no generally efficient motive to do it. It would be done only by some very eccentric person, and so seldom as to be of little public importance. Such a disposition, instead of founding a Family with a Head and land knit to its Head, would destroy it. The ruling motive for Family Settlements is the aggrandizement of the Family by securing to its Head the possession of land. Even Thellusson's extravagant and coldblooded selfishness worked to that end. Under the existing Law men may suspend the ownership of land much longer than they actually do. I may devise land to a thousand babies in succession for their lives, and then provide that on the death of the junior the land shall go to the youngest offspring then living of the thousand, and that if he dies under twenty-one it shall go to the next youngest, and so on till a taker attains twenty-one. The ownership would thus be suspended almost certainly for a century by the mere force of my will. But such dispositions are not made for the simple reason that they would not minister to Family ambition.

80. My proposal has also been objected to as insufficient because it would, as it is said, reduce the term of uncertainty or suspension

of ownership only by twenty-one years, and would leave the mischief of limited ownership untouched. I think that with some of those who make this objection the question between them and me is rather one of words than substance, because they say that it is further necessary to abolish entails. I too would repeal the Statute of Entails. I would do so because an entail is, not technically but in its social effect, a gift to the unborn. The very essence of an entail, the only object which its creators had in view, was to deprive the existing generation of the ownership of land in order that it may be secured to future generations of the same Family. And, unless my reading of the Law of Entail and its attendant history be entirely at fault, this is the one essential principle which has been so keenly and pertinaciously upheld and opposed with varying fortune. The abolition of entails is involved in the proposal to forbid gifts to the unborn.

81. Those who desire to learn more of this subject should read the able work of the Warden of Merton, or at least those chapters of it in which he discusses these and kindred topics with more fulness than is permitted to me here.* Mr. Brodrick's own suggestion is to put an end to life estates, whereby all gifts must become gifts of the inheritance, whether for an estate in tail or one in fee-simple. I admit the efficacy of such a reform. The question

in my mind is whether while destroying much that is mischievous it would not also destroy something of value which might be retained under another mode of reform. I have made some remarks on this point above in par. 69. But to those who think that prohibition of gifts to the unborn would merely shorten the period of suspense by twenty-one years, leaving the mischief of limited ownership untouched, I must put in a demurrer. I attach a great deal more importance to the motives to which rules of law minister than to the mere technical operation of the rules themselves. The prohibition of gifts to the unborn would operate directly and powerfully on the motive under which the vast majority of life estates are created. They are created for the very purpose of passing over the existing generation in favour of the next for the very purpose of giving to the unborn. A landowner cuts down the interest of his son to a life interest for no other purpose than that his unborn grandson may take the land. Take away his power to do that, and what is the result? Why, that the very same motive which before led him to cut down his son to a life interest will now lead him to give his son an absolute ownership, because only in that way is there a possibility that his land may remain entire in the Head of his Family. I think that a careful study of the ways in which men have "English Land and English Landlords." By the Hon. George Brodrick. Cassell, Petter & Galpin. 1881.

acted in this department of their affairs will lead us to the conclusion that, if gifts to the unborn are forbidden, life estates will rarely be created except for the reasonable and beneficial purposes I have before pointed out.

82. If the reform here suggested were effected, the Land Laws would be practically the same as they were during the two centuries after the decision in Taltarum's case. I do not know that any complaint of them was made. When the Legislature dealt with the subject, it did so by way of further encroachments upon the Statute of Entails, not by way of enlarging the power of settlement. They were altered only by the ingenuity of lawyers for the purpose of allaying fears of forfeiture for rebellion, or of ministering to Family ambition. In the course of time those alterations, though working silently, have produced a mighty effect. The reversal of them would doubtless produce a mighty effect too, with equal silence and smoothness, though it would require time, say a generation, for its full operation. Or at least if it did not, it would do no harm, and we should at least know that the alarming concentration of our land is due to great, spontaneous, and, so to speak, natural causes, and not to artificial laws designed for the purpose.

83. I believe that land-owners think that such a reform would lessen their power. Of course if land becomes more distributed, the political power which results from its possession will be shared among a larger number. In that sense some Families will lose power, and others will gain. But give the ownership of so many acres, and it is a distinct increase of power to each generation in turn that the land should be free; that each owner should be absolute owner, and not share his ownership with the dead and the unborn. All that would be taken away is that phantom of power which consists in dictating to future generations. The life-owners who now have to bargain with their sons, and the remainder-men who have to bargain with their fathers, will no longer do so. All will be more assured of their position, and be freer to discharge their duties towards the community.

84. And whatever other arrangements may be considered reasonable and judicious after full discussion, such a reform as this will be found a most useful handmaid, if indeed it be not an indispensable preliminary, to their working. For example, it is proposed and it may be arranged to give some public authority power to take land for the purpose of doling it out again for adequate prices in small allotments or holdings. I cannot understand what objection of principle there is to such a proposal, provided the present owners of land so taken are justly compensated, as they have always hitherto been in the numerous expropriations made of late years for public purposes. I have no great faith in the scheme working very ex

tensively, but if carefully administered on a sound financial basis it may prove a valuable addition to the forces in favour of multiplying interests in land. Certainly the simplicity of system effected by the reform I propose will aid the acquisition of land for such a purpose, and will also prevent small parcels of land, whether acquired by this or other means, from falling into the ruinous complexity of title which now crushes them. I put this only as an example. Registration of course is another. Nor do I think that any good scheme is conceivable which will not be helped by getting rid of the claims of the Unborn to interfere with the interests of the Living.

85. My proposal is not calculated to strike the imagination like the vast schemes which are now in the air, and of which I have briefly spoken in the earlier part of this paper. To their advocates, to those who expect all things in an hour, perhaps to those who have not studied the working of our Land Laws through long periods of history, it may seem so slight and simple as to be puerile or so technical as to be pedantic. It is however, whether wise or unwise, efficient or futile, the outcome of a long and close acquaintance with the subject. It is merely to restore to living men the power of making their own arrangements according to their own views of their own welfare. If it operates to effect great alterations, it will do so not by any violent convulsion or shock, but by easy gradual voluntary acts, each minute in itself though the aggregate be vast. The principles I would apply are very simple and feasible, and we know of their working in this country and elsewhere. If they are adopted we may expect that the younger ones of us will see great ameliorations effected by processes as tranquil and spontaneous as those by which the sapling grows into a tree, or the boy into a man.

HOBHOUSE.

NOTE. Since the above was in type I have read two documents bearing on the questions here discussed. One is the Report of the Council of the Incorporated Law Society, containing an excellent statement of the law and an abie and temperate discussion of proposed reforms from the standpoint of those who would maintain the existing powers of Strict Settlement. I would commend it to the perusal of those who wish to see the case against my views well stated. The second document is a paper contributed by Mr. Justice Stephen to the last number of the National Review. To those who know, as I do, his originality and resource, and hope to gain advantage from them, it is disappointing; because he has addressed himself mainly to the technical part of the question, and to the

recommendation, which in one shape or another is made on hands, that the devolution of real property shall be largely assimilated to that of personalty. I notice it here because his brief treatment of that side of the subject which is far the most important, the social side, is likely to mislead his readers. He holds, if I read him aright, that the complaint against the concentration of land in a few hands, is a complaint not against any law, but against the inequality of lots in this life. He does not apply his mind to the questions whether the concentration is a bad thing or a good, and whether it is or is not the result of highly artificial laws expressly designed to bring it about. Moreover Mr. Justice Stephen appears to think that the great prevalence of Strict Settlements proves that they answer some general want of society. But again he does not ask whether they are made by people for themselves which would prove the general want, or by one set of people for another set of people which only proves a general love of exercising power when the opportunity is given. His argument would be equally good to prove the beneficial character of the intractable, but universally spread, entails under the statute, or indeed of any other institution, which, introduced for the benefit of the powerful few, has pervaded the land. Anybody who has followed my remarks in this paper with even a small amount of approbation will agree that the questions here propounded must be discussed and answered before it can be decided that Family Settlements are simply the expression of legitimate wishes, or that those who try to abate undue concentration of land are simply attacking the inevitable inequality of human conditions.

H.