all the children. Taking, then, the broad rule for granted that the possessions of the parents must pass in equal portions to the children, there is seen to be wanted some strict guard on what a man bequeaths 60 that it shall not be squandered by his heirs. We can best follow out the result in regard to possession in land. Entail should be placed on a natural basis and carried out on a broader scale, and it would become a mighty instrument for good and for raising the general condition of the people without taking away the stimulus to labor.
There is provision in nature for the nationalization of the land. As soon as all the direct descendants are treated as heirs, the fact that these rapidly multiply till they are coextensive with the nation shows that, if the property left at death by the present possessors be similarly extended, all the land of the country now in so few hands must eventually come into the possession of the whole nation, and that not by any act of confiscation, but by simply acknowledging fact and doing justice. It would not answer, however, to go on subdividing property endlessly down to yards and inches. A limit would have to be set to subdivision and to inheritance by means of it, and after a certain generation, where the descendants had already become scores or hundreds, or after a certain degree of tenuity in the property had been reached, so that the forfeiture of his share would be no particular loss to the individual heir, it would be necessary to annex the whole to the national estate, swiftly accumulating by similar processes. If this rule were universally acted upon, though a man's descendants would cease, say, m the fourth or fifth generation to be his heirs in particular, the little amount they forfeited in this way would be more than made up to them by the many other inheritances of which they would become heirs in common with the nation. The railways could be passed through the same process by the gradual distribution of shares. As far as practicable other property should be dealt with on the same principle. This would bring about a general diffusion of wealth now congested in a few hands, and bring it about, too, gradually and safely by the operation of the great natural law of heirship through successive generations.
Already we have extensive properties that are owned by the nation at large, such as the roads and canals, the post-offices and telegraphs, the board-schools and the Established Churches, the parks, free libraries, and Government buildings. The principle is in operation, and, if it had the wider sphere that heirship demands, there would be an immense lightening of the burdens which are pressing upon the people. Each individual would commence life at an advantage, a few steps up the ladder instead of being down quite in the ditch, as are the majority—poor and penniless, dependent for everything on the exertions of the present hour. The rent of the national property might, as has been recently advocated, go to the payment of the taxes imperial and local. It might answer for the necessary work of government, for the
