The Sun.
London, England, 1859-03-21 00:00:00

The true policy of the State in this regard is very
clear. If it is to make a will where its subjects
make none, it should be that which a wise and good
man would make for himself. We have an order
of nobility—an order of gentry—a territorial aris-
tocracy. It is considered by our statesmen (?) to
be highly politic to encourage the accumulation of
great estates—to discountenance division of land as
much as possible. Well, has the State a right to
adopt such a system in defiance of the cries of nature,
and the dictates of equal justice ? Is it wise for a
State any more than for an individual to do evil
that good may come ? Can a publicist legitimately
take up the position that what is morally wrong
may he politically right ; that it ever can be the
true policy of a nation to do that as an aggregated
corporation which is opposed to the plain obliga-
tions of its individual subjects ? If it be wise, in
the proper acceptation of that term, for a State to
encourage its subjects to disinherit their children,
then clearly it is the duty of those subjects to do it
themselves. Has any father of a family a right to
say :—" The ruin of my daughters is for the advan-
tage of the country, therefore let them be ruined ?"
Did society exist before the family ? Is not the
family the first community, the very elementary
principle of society itself? Is there any responsi-
bility in the world paramount to that which a man
owes to those whom he himself has called into
being, and for whose happiness to the extent of his
ability he is plainly accountable? When the ques-
tion is plainly put before the reason and the unso-
phisticated conscience of the husband and the father,
there is no hesitation in the answer. When a parent
is asked to leave his girls in beggary, that England
may sustain its order of Peers, the most conserva-
tive of us begin to think that the cost of sacrifice is
far beyond the return. A Minister now in office
has indeed propounded the sentiment—
" Let laws and learning, trade and commerce die,
But spare us still our old nobility!'
Lord John Manners himself is ashamed of the sen-
timent, but it reigns with all its nriginal spirit in
the minds of the defenders of the policy of primo-
geniture.
We have argued the question of the morality and

justice of the law as opposed to its policy, lint in
truth they are not antagonistic—they cannot be in
opposition. All truth is harmonious ; there is
nothing contradictory in justice ; nothing can be
expedient which is not right. A knave is but a fool
with a circumbendibus. Honesty is the best policy.
When we would know what is wise, the conscience
has given us a short cut to it. Our instincts were
given us, our moral intuitions, to be the substitutes
for reason and for wisdom. Out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings has God perfected his praise;
because the dictates of their pure and innocent
moral impulses lead to the very conclusions which
worldly wisdom and philosophy also, arrive at by
painful elaboration and anxious deduction. The
State policy of primogeniture is as unsound as its
morality is questionable.
We have never advocated the compulsory subdi-
vision of land or realty. If the owner, by deed,
directs it to be cumulated, let him. In a country
such as this, no stimulus is required to the tendency
to accumulation. Where fortunes of a plum are
common, and millionaires may be counted by the
dozen, there will always be large estates in suffi-
cient number for any purposes of the maintenance
of a territorial aristocracy. So long as these estates
are wisely held by the prudent, the virtuous, by
social benefactors, they will remain in the family.
But land is not a mere benefice. God's earth is a
solemn trust committed to the holder for the good
of all. Whenever, therefore, the proprietor becomes
unworthy—whenever he misuses his property to the
prejudice of the community—it naturally passes
from him into more frugal and intelligent hands,
unless the order of Providence be thwarted by the
folly of man, in adopting the policy of primogeni-
ture. Guizot dates the progress of England from the
period of the division and sale of the Church lands
among the people. Family pride and the law
of primogeniture ruined Ireland ruined the
very persons sought to be benefited by the
policy. The Encumbered Estates Courts, which
are really a device for ridding the country of
the evils of the law of intestacy—which have thrown
huge properties in subdivided parcels upon the
market—which have dispersed the accumulations
of ages, and practically repealed the law of primo-
geniture—are the very source and centre of the
regeneration of Ireland. They have encouraged a
resident yeomanry in the room of lordly absentees
or spendthrift outlaws and refugee heirs ; they have
called small capitalists to colonise the soil and to
form a resident middle class ; they have, in a word,
converted Ireland from turbulent discontent and
squalid misery to reverence for the law, social order,
and high material prosperity. It is no hazardous pre',
diction to prophesy that, in a few years, the Pope's
brass band will have as little place in Ireland as in
Exeter, and that a constituency will spring into
being whose intelligence and independence will
render them the safest depositories of political
power that true statesmanship could desire.
Do these facts suggest to the reader the political
moral we would apply to them ? It is not our pur-
pose at this time to discuss the question of the
comparative merits of large or small holdings. We
reserve for a calmer time the consideration of the
philosophy of the economics of the subject. What
in this connection it is important to keep in view is
the relation which the theory of primogeniture