Page:North Dakota Reports (vol. 1).pdf/253

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PENFIELD v. TOWER.
229

we are of the opinion that the power of sale for the purpose of a division as provided in the will falls with it, and cannot be executed as a separate and independent provision.”

But it is further insisted that under the authority to sell conferred upon the trustees the absolute power of alienation is not suspended at all; that there are always some persons in being by whom an absolute interest in possession can be conveyed. This, in a measure, is true, so far as the particular real estate left by the testator is concerned. But it is not true with respect to the trust property. Whether that property is real or personal, it is not during the trust subject to disposition as property owned absolutely. The power of disposition is limited. It cannot be sold as property free from a trust. The common law contemplates a sale by an owner of both the legal and equitable title, after the prescribed period. The rule forbidding perpetuities relates to personal as well as real property, and certainly the reason for the rule embraces both kinds of property. In this age it is even more important that the sale of personal property, which constitutes the greater portion of our wealth and the chief subject of trade, should be unfettered than that real estate should be subject to free disposition. If a trust of personal property cannot endure for longer than lives in being and twenty-one years and the period of gestation thereafter, is a trust of real estate, which is subject to the same rule, rendered valid by the mere power in the trustee to convert one kind of trust property into another, the property all the time remaining under the trust? If the bare authority to alter the nature of the trust property could save the trust from the condemnation of the doctrine against perpetuities, then a trust of real estate to endure forever could be made valid by a discretionary power in the trustee to change the corpus of the trust-estate from real to personal property. The authorities are clear on this point, and they hold that a discretionary power to change the nature of the property will not make real estate subject to a trust susceptible of that alienation, the absolute power of which the common law and the statute against perpetuities declare shall not be suspended beyond a certain period. Brewer v. Brewer, 11 Hun, 147; affirmed in 72 N. Y. 603; Hobson v. Hale, 95 N. Y. 588-609;