the sole guide upon such questions; and pursuant to this maxim, I may be permitted to repeat, that according to the law and usages of Bengal, though a father may be charged with breach of religious duty, by a sale or gift of ancestral property at his own discretion, he should not be subjected to the pain of finding his act nullified; nor the purchaser punished with forfeiture of his acquisition. However, when the author of the Review shall have succeeded in inducing British legislators to adopt his maxim, and declare that the validity of every act shall be determined by its consistence with morality, we may then listen to his suggestion, for applying ihe same rule to the Bengal Law of Inheritance.
34. The writer of this Review quotes (in p. 221) a passage from the Dayubhagu, (Ch. II. Sec. 76,) “Since the circumstance of the father being lord of all the wealth, is stated as a reason, and that cannot be in regard to the grandfather’s eatate, an unequal distribution, made by the father, is lawful only in the instance of his own acquired wealth.” He then comments, saying, “Nothing can be more clear than Jeemootvahun’s assertion of this doctrine.” But it would have been still more clear, if the writer had cited the latter part of the sentence obviously connected with the former; which is that, “Accordingly Vishnoo says, ‘When a father separates his sons from himself, his own will regulates the division of his own acquired wealth. But in the estate inherited from the grandfather, the ownership of father and son is equal.’” That is, a father is not absolute lord of his ancestral property, (as he is of his own acquired wealth,) when occupied in separating his sons from himself during his
