Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/635

 596

THE GREEN BAG

ference by the executive power, confiscatory legislation, are all quack remedies, worse than the disease, because they all deal with symptoms only; none of them strike at the root of the disease and eradicate it. Be sides, they all involve the prostitution of the powers of government to improper pur poses, which tends inevitably to the eventual destruction of all free institutions — nay, all government itself. Where, then, shall we find the remedy? I represent several railroads and some rich employers of labor. I am thoroughly famil iar with conditions in Louisiana and several adjacent states. In respect of the abnormal accumulation of wealth in individual hands, and the consequent prevailing unrest and spirit of socialism that is to-day abroad in the land, I do not hesitate to say that my own, my native state, Louisiana, is far and away more fortunately situated than any other state in the union. A priori, this would seem strange, if not impossible; for Louisiana has the most heterogeneous popu lation, living under the most widely varied conditions, of any portion of America. Her people differ from one another in race, religion, language, and tradition. Her topo graphical structure embraces every type from marsh to mountain. Her variety of climate is illustrated by the variety of her products, which embrace everything from the cotton, cane, figs, and oranges of the South to the wheat, rye, and barley of the North, and from the beautiful tropic camelia to the shrinking northern crocus. It is but a few short years ago that her laws were printed and the processes of her courts con ducted both in the English and the French languages. Despite all these contrarieties and consequent obstacles to harmonious government, I repeat that Louisiana is to day the most happily governed state in the republic, and freest from the "hastening ills" of which the rest complain. Of course, there is a reason for this. It is to be found in the beneficent wisdom of her laws. There is no subject of which both

the people and the profession of other states are so ignorant as the law of Louisiana. To paraphrase an expression much in vogue, it is more Roman than the Civil Law, more French than the law of France. Trans lated from La Belle France to the banks of the Mississippi in the heroic days of the Consulate, it escaped the withering touch of the despotic hands of the first and second empires, and their ill-starred attempts to establish a parvenu aristocracy on the ruins of the republic. The law of Louisiana prohibits fidei commissa, or common law trusts, and makes the distribution of estates compulsory by forced heirship. The direct, sure, constant, and powerful operation of these laws effectively prevents the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few or makes it merely tem porary. Under their salutary influence the distribution of wealth is uninterruptedly and automatically accomplished. It may be asked to what good purpose did our fore fathers flee to the wilderness to escape the baleful effects of the laws of primogeniture, entails, and the other legal buttresses of an arrogant and oppressive aristocracy in Eng land if they are to be revived here, as they are being revived to-day, in the form of a family compact by which the bulk of almost every great fortune is devised to one child, coupled with the agreement that it shall pass on down the line from father to son to the end of time; or if entails are practically reestablished here, as they are being rees tablished, by long trusts whereby property is tied up and taken out of commerce for an indefinite period. These evils are dissipated and cannot reap pear under a system of law-forbidding trusts and compelling the distribution of estates by an equal division among the heirs. Thomas Jefferson declared that the best of all agrarian laws is the law of equal distri bution among heirs. The limits of this paper do not permit a full discussion of the powerful influence ex ercised by the laws of inheritance upon