Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/586

 certainly since the beginning of the Avorld no one ever paid so dearly for a simple ejaculation of impatience. The baronet was coming home one night, attended by a groom of the duke's, and fell into one of the duke's dykes. As he was helped out, after a thorough ducking, he said impatiently "D—n these canals," or, as solicitors write, words to that effect. The groom reported the incautious burst, and the duke, resenting an insult to what was the hobby of his life, struck the utterer out of his will.

The dukedom, however, disappeared, and a lesser Marquis of Bridgewater inherited, but to the Marquis there was no one of the name to succeed, and this fine and honourably-won estate, whose value was estimated at nearly two millions, seemed likely to ramble in the loose lineage of distant collaterals, chosen perhaps arbitrarily, rather than enjoy the steady and more magnificent descent of hereditary succession.

In this extremity the owner resolved to make an effort to create, if he could not find. He accordingly made an arrangement by which all this vast property was to pass to the Lord Alford of the time, then a mere child; but on this strict condition, that if within five years after his becoming Earl of Brownlow, he did not succeed in obtaining the rank of Marquis or Duke of Bridgewater, the estates were to pass from him to a younger brother. The latter, also, was allowed the same mystic time, to make the same attempt, and in case of failure incurred the same forfeiture. In 1849, Lord Alford succeeded to the estates, and in about two years later died without having become Lord Brownlow, and, of course, without having entered on the term of probation. Then arose some very nice law points. To whom were the estates to pass? To Lord Alford's infant son? No, it was urged this would utterly deprive the brother of his chance of the reversion. To the brother? No. For the deceased had not entered on his term of probation, and had therefore not forfeited it. This part of the case turned on the point, whether there was a condition precedent, as it is called, and is purely technical. So it may be laid aside here; but a greater question loomed behind, and about it the real battle was fought. A great nightmare for courts and ancient judges, is any act or theory bearing "against public policy," which is certain to invest the question with an awful and preternatural horror. Thus any well-meant check by a parent upon his children's marriage, though otherwise harmless enough, is at once blighted by the anathema "against public policy."

The great cause—for it became a great one—lumbered upwards, in the usual way, through the various courts, halting before the vice-chancellor. The arguments on this point are excessively ingenious, and quite intelligible to the unprofessional hearer. It was urged that as an impossibiltyimpossibility [sic] is always void, it was here impossible that any man should by his own act become a marquis or a duke. But it was replied that this would be true if the party were called upon to create any one earl or marquis, which would be an impossibility. It was then objected that there was here a hint of corruption, and that it was extremely improbable that within a limited term of five years a man should have done public services, or found opportunity for them exactly proportioned to such a splendid reward. But then there was quoted, in reply, the well-known family arrangement of bequeathing a living to a son if he should enter holy orders. The vice-chancellor, on the whole, took the public policy side, and pronounced the arrangement void. The cause, of course, drifted past him contemptuously, and was drawn by legal tugs into the House of Lords. It was precisely a question to bring out most dramatically the tone and temper of those remarkable men, Lyndhurst, Brougham, St. Leonard's, Truro. All spoke with warmth, as on a great constitutional question. Lord Brougham put it very happily. He gave the testator credit, no doubt, for meaning that this title was to be won by honourable means; but, supposing he had been asked whether he imagined that a dukedom was to be obtained merely by an exemplary life, he would naturally think he was being turned into ridicule. The real danger, he said, would be the temptation to try and influence those who acted for the crown, not in the shape of coarse, naked bribery; but there were many ways of reaching the same end. Lord Truro took the same line, and Lord St. Leonard's, with very great heat, denounced it as an insult and indignity to the crown, for, he acutely added, the subject pointed out a particular title and rank which he required to be obtained. In a sort of constitutional tremor, which recals the old disrespectful speaking of the Equator, he said it was a fearful issue, and one from which he recoiled.

All these strong and influential opinions being against this arrangement, the careless outsider would naturally suppose they were equally against the interest of the person they most nearly affected. If the conditions were void by which Lord Alford was to benefit, his prospects were also void. But not so. There is a wonderful and erratic uncertainty in the ways of the law. These adverse opinions operated against the testator merely. The Lords, as it were, took up the will, and drew their pen across the obnoxious clause, and then returned it to the young lord. He, therefore, possibly to his own surprise, received his vast estates, discharged from this inconvenient condition, and without having his conscience burdened with any sins against public policy or the sovereign's prerogative.