convenience the problem has been treated by Lord Nottingham and other judges who have specially allowed extensions of this power of disposition.

On the other hand while there is no right in a landowner to call upon the State to enforce all the directions which he may give for the use and management of the land which once was his, extending for forty, sixty or a hundred years after his death, neither is there any right in his children to claim all or any portion of his land unless in cases where their father has raised expectations of a particular mode of division, on which their habits and lives have been shaped.

It is alleged in favour of the system of primogenitary settlement that it is useful in maintaining a hereditary peerage. This assumes that an hereditary peerage should be maintained, a point which in 1885 can hardly be considered one of universal agreement. And if a hereditary peer is the better for the possession of sufficient property to ensure independence, this can be secured by the free power of devise in fee simple, which can be exercised by an hereditary peer in the interests of his order and his family.

But it is said that the preservation of ancient families can only be effected by some such means as this. It may be answered that families worth preserving will preserve themselves; that protection of ancient families is only needed against those of their members who are spendthrifts and scapegraces. For honourable and intelligent men may be trusted to do their duty to their family and the land without restrictions from without; it is the worthless members of families who must be bound. But this means that men unfit to be landowners must yet be tied to their land, and the land and its tenants will suffer accordingly. They would be benefited by transfer to another lord, but they are tied to a careless and improvident landlord, who cannot free himself if he would, for the sake of his family. To preserve worthless but ancient families is hardly a sufficient justification for checking the development of English lands, and hampering the agriculture of English

tenants.

The general social effects of primogeniture and settlement are also enlarged on; it is said to create a leisure class, a

resident proprietary, whose co-operation in county government is invaluable, and whose despotic but kindly rule showers blessings on their parish and district. But with large estates, large portions of them must inevitably lose the blessing of a resident landlord; and though the rule of the ideal great landowner may be beneficial, the rule of the actual one, tested by experience, has hardly proved so in all cases. The squires and their allies, the clergy, have had undisputed sway over rural England for centuries; what account can they give of their stewardship with regard to the labourer who has worked on their land? How can they justify the cottages they have provided for him; how can they defend as sufficient the provisions they had made for his education before the passing of Mr Forster's Act; how can they regard the position which the agricultural labourer is taking at the present time' as any other than a just recompense for centuries of neglect by those who have had the power to help them. While some settled estates have been admirably managed, too many of such estates, held by encumbered life tenants who cannot afford to live in their own mansion, bear eloquent testimony to the evils of limited ownership under the English land-system.

The system of entails and settlements is therefore to be condemned both in the interests of the nation, whose development it obstructs, and in the interests of the families it is intended to preserve. It injures the nation by producing political instability, by depressing the classes of farmers and labourers, and by hindering the adequate cultivation of the land. It is hurtful to the families by placing land in improper hands, by destroying proper parental control, by rearing up younger children in a manner which unfits them for their work in the world, and by hindering the proper development of the land in the interests of the family. On all these grounds it is desirable that all powers of settlement, or devise of land, other than a simple grant or devise in fee simple should be swept away, so that every landowner should be the absolute and unrestricted owner of his land.

Written November, 1885.

2 Whether an exception should be made in favour of life estates to widows

is perhaps arguable, though I think the proposal in the text is preferable.

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CONCLUSION.

I have now completed the task I proposed to myself at the outset. I have endeavoured to trace step by step and in historical sequence the growth and change of the Land Laws of England, and the motives of policy which prompted the legislation of the Parliament, the construction of the judges, and the evasive devices of landowners and their legal advisers. The pride of the owners of land has fettered their families to their estates: "Te teneam moriens is the dying lord's apostrophe to his manor, for which he is forging those fetters that seem by restricting the dominion of others to extend his own." The intricacies of the family settlement, while they add to the costs of transfer of land, hinder its development in the hands of a limited owner, and weaken the nation whose masses they leave landless and at the mercy of a small but wealthy class. All things point to the conclusion already expressed in this essay, and set out more than 200 years ago by an anonymous pamphleteer: "It were convenient that there might be no estate but absolute, for life or inheritance, without condition or entails, whether given by will or purchased by deed in writing; and this would shorten all suits about estates1."

13 Jurid. Soc. 598, from pamphlet of 1648.

INDEX.