Page:Landholding in England.djvu/160

 the Civil Wars brought a change. Each side alike treated its adversaries as "traitors," and confiscated their estates, and the lawyers became as anxious to save estates by tying them up to persons yet unborn as they had formerly been the reverse.

The essential feature of the system they devised was the power of settling land on an unborn eldest son, who, as soon as he came of age, could make a fresh settlement with his father in favour of his own unborn eldest son. In failure of a son the land goes to the next male legal representative of the family, in strict line of primogeniture, which thus works with entail to keep an estate intact. Only on the entire failure of heirs male did an estate go to a female. Under entail, the rights of the heir, born or unborn, are everything. His estate can be neither divided nor alienated—it is not even liable for the personal debts of the deceased owner. On attaining the age of twenty-one he can, if he and his father, or the present owner, agree, make a settlement, "cutting off the entail," and restoring to the owner the power of sale or bequest. But it is very seldom that either party desires this while there is every inducement for the heir to wish to tie up the land to his own heir. It is very easy to see how this has favoured the accumulation of land in a few hands.

Mr Shaw-Lefevre, in his admirable little book, "English and Irish Land Questions," gives a very clear description of the process of "settling" landed property. The main object of entails of land is, he observes, to "preserve landed property intact and undivided, and to make it descend to the furthest point possible in the direct line of succession." English Law has always been very jealous of creating "perpetuities"—but as usual only in name. The extreme legal limit of a "settlement" is for lives in being, and twenty-one years after but there is every inducement for a landowner to renew the entail, and so create a virtual perpetuity.

"The position of the father and son with reference to the property is this. The father has only a life-