Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/208

 application here, to the content and comfort of multitudes of homes. But keeping in view, as our main principle, this said justice to the land, it was comparatively easy to attain suitable land measures.

There was no long battle over primogeniture, entails, and the other remnants of an old feudality, which had admittedly fallen out of consonance with modern sentiment and social conditions. The public law, at any rate, must not deal injustice in family inheritance, whatever may be allowed to private authority. And, again, the dead hand must be entirely lifted off the living world. Those who quitted the world must not hamper and trammel those left in its charge. And, again, the vicious habit of provision-making for heirs and descendants, instead of allowing them the healthful stimulus of fighting their own way in the world, must be further checked by strict limitation to persons actually in life. This form of injustice to the country's future, as well as to the individual himself, must not be perpetrated upon the unborn.

While we in the mother country were still in the throes of vexations and interminable discussions over our complex land title, after repeated failure of permissive and tentative measures, our colonial children were already in the full enjoyment of public registry of title, and the consequent prompt and inexpensive land dealing. Our suggestion that the State should undertake, and at once, to clear the title for the whole country was adopted. The State was duly at work, "clearing and registering title" everywhere, with all the promptitude possible to so huge a work, to the boundless advantage of the