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

THE SUN, LONDON, MONDAY EVENING, MARCH72I, 1859.

his memory ; and in doing so has nobly declared '
that here at least the reproach contained in the old
proverb does not apply—"that a prophet has no
honour in his own country." (Hear, hear.) More-
over, this noble statue will act as a lasting incite-
ment to young men among our citizens here who
are, like Mr. Steel, fighting the battle of life. May
not every young man, however humble his present
position, if struggling upwards with the right mind
and the right aim, as he passes is his midday meal.
look up to this noble statue and take courage ?
(Loud cheers.)
This concluded the ceremony. The band now
played the national anthem, after which the pro-
cession was re-formed and returned to the Town-
hall. The friends of the late Mr. Steel afterwards
proceeded to the Coffeehouse, where they partook
of wine and cake. The " Memory of James Steel"
was proposed by the Mayor and drank in solemn
silence by the company upstanding, and after the
health of the Mayor had been proposed by Mr.
Elliot and duly honoured; the company separates.

P_RIMOGENITURE AND REFORM.

(From the Dispatch.)
The first principle of the law ought to be the
equality of subjects before it. From all allegiance
is equally claimed—to all justice is equally, due. It
may be in strict pursuance of that principle that it
should be recognised as the right of every man to
do what he likes with his own, or to do what is
even morally questionable, because liberty of choice
is his social right ; but wherever the law itself is
called in as the arbiter, wherever the State itself
speaks as the aggregate of the moral sense of the
nation, there should the utterance be truth and jus-
tice without fear or favour, there should it demon •
strate to all its subjects that it is " too fond of the
right to adopt the expedient." What is an elder
son to this State more than a younger ? Is not
a girl its subject as well as a boy ? Why,
then, should the public law be made the tool of a
class, and an instrument of disinheritism ? There, is
not a country in Europe that retains our law of pri-
mogeniture. Entails are scouted in the jurispru-
dence of every kingdom out of England. The lean-
ing of our law has been uniformly against them,
and they have been retained in our courts only by
the compulsion of our legislators. Nay, the very
principle of family preferences is condemned by our
own policy, except in one direction. Should a Roths-
child leave his millions in the funds, the eldest son,
in case of intestacy, takes no morethan his youngest
daughter. Should the owner of riches "beyond the
fancy of human avarice" die a bachelor, the legion
of his next in kin would all participate alike.
But because a man by accident has happened to
invest his money in land in place of Consols,
to add field to field and house to house where
another preferred five per cent. in railways, or 20
in bank shares, it pleases our wiseacres to hold that
he should leave his younger children destitute, and
to make a golden calf of the fool of the family.
We are told, indeed, that the squire may make a
will. We are asked why the man who wants to
leave all to his eldest son should be forced to sign a
testamentary deed, in place of requiring him who is
for an equal division to do so ? It were easy to
retort the question, " What's sauce for thd goose is
sauce for the gander." But to our apprehension
the distinction is very plain. If a man wants to
disinherit his children, let the act be his own, not
that of the State. Equality before the law is the
plain guide of the latter for all its subjects. The
King Lears of society should be made to do their
own dirty work. The man who, in the language
of Scripture, seeks "to turn him away from his own
flesh," should not be suffered to cheat his conscience
out of the sense of its duties and responsibilities, by
getting society to become the scapegoat of his
whimsical partialities and capricious dislikes. Let
the law force a freeholder to make a will if he de-
sires to rob his children, and how seldom will even
a rogue make a will ?
There are tens of thousands of ignorant men in
this country who have no conception whatever of
the operation of the law in reference to succession.
There are very many who are too indolent and too
procrastinating to make a will, who even grudge
the mere expense, but who would never voluntarily
by positive act give their whole realty to one child.
Their property passes to the heir by sheer default ;
they either do not know the effect of the law, or
they are too lazy to obviate its inequalities by any
decision of their own.

bears to the subject of Reform. The proletaires of
France are its Republicans and revolutionists. The
freeholders are the conservators of peace, law, and
order. Their savings form the Rentes—the public
funds hold their recognisances for allegiance to the
State. The extension of the franchise in our counties
to all tenants paying a rental of £lO, virtually gives
the preponderance of power into the hands of the
landless, and places the tenantry far in ascendancy
above the landholders. To what is that owing but
to the laws of primogeniture and entail ? Had land
been subjected to the same laws of distribution as
personalty, would we ever have seen the spectacle,
in a nation of twenty-seven millions of people, of
twenty-six millions six hundred and fifty thou-
sand of them having no property in the soil
whereon they are born, and the whole freehold of
the acreage of these islands being concentrated in
the tenure of three hundred and fifty thousand
people ? Is it safe in any community to have a
nation of Lacklands ? If you attach political rights
to property, and also to persons, is it wise to divorce
the property from the persons—to range the elec-
tors on the one side, and the land on the other P. It
is high time that statesmen, if they mean to trans-
fer the issues of power from its present holders,
should prepare the basis of a peaceable and orderly
constituency, giving securities to society for their
patriotism and loyalty in the possession of the land
whose tenure is identified with the stability of the
State, and the well-affected temper of its subjects.
We go on encouraging the Tritons of capital to add
field to field, and house to house ; we drive our
middle classes from the land into the great towns ;
we run small farms into greater ; we enclose every
common; we buy up every bit of land the poor can
be prevailed upon to sell ; heir and heiress come
together, and join two huge estates in the tenure of
the son and heir, so that no freeholds are left for
the residue of the population ; whole counties are
cleared in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands that
red deer may range undisturbed, that turnips,
wurtzel, and sheep may yield more profit than
..human beings, and bullocks may replace the expa-
triated Celt who hangs his harp on the willows and
murmurs " Lochaber no more ! ' in Canada or at
the Cape. We hurry all the younger children out
of their country homes ; we " make a solitude and
call it peace."
The time is rapidly hastening to the consumma-
tion when the large-acred proprietors will find their
only safety to lie in surrounding themselves with
sturdy. yeomen and intelligent freeholders; when
it will be seen how dangerous it is to have
only the very rich and the very poor, a few
great squires and a mass of dependants with-
out property of their own. This forced congestion
of population to great centres has already borne
its fruits ; there alone it has been that the
discontent_ and restless activity of the proletairiat
have threatened the subversion of public order
again and again. In the cities it is too much the
tendency to concentrate trade and manufac-
tures in masses—a few employers, and all the
rest mere dependent receivers of wages, the
middle orders of traders being crushed out of the
field. The same process goes ma in the counties in
reference to land and farmers. Estates are becoming
mere manufactories of food, arranged between vast
owners and huge occupiers. It remains to be seen
whether the handfuls of squires and great tenants
can hold their own against the ten-pound occupiers
in the villages. A well-ordered society should be
made up of insensible gradations, all running into
each other. Any policy which classifies and sepa-
rates them—which divides their interests—which
is suggestive of alienated sympathies, or defines a
line of demarcation between class and order, is cer-
tain to array the majority against the few. At a
time when agriculture has risen into a science, and
as much food can be raised on one acre as formerly
grew on five—when high farming makes more pro-
fit on a few acres, skilfully cultivated, than on a
whole parish left to weeds and. rushes—when, in
fact, the area of the soil has been practically quad-
rupled by agricultural improvements—the excuse
for this policy of land monopoly becomes daily less.
To lay the foundation of an intelligent, indepen-
dent, and orderly county constituency, it is neces-
sary to begin by a repeal of the law of primogeni-
ture.

ASSIZE INTELLIGENCE.

MIDLAND CIRCUIT.—DERBY, March 19.
CROWN COURT.
(Before Mr. Justice Erle.)
Samuel Saunders was charged with shooting, on
Nov. 13, at Job Ashton, with intent to kill him. _