Page:The Settled Estates Act, 1882.djvu/20

16 it is liberal where liberality is needed; it moves on the line I have before indicated, of only so far interfering with the object of the settlement, and the restrictions of limited ownership as is compatible with removing all checks from the saleability and proper cultivation of the land. I have only time to give a brief outline of its main powers, as an elaborate analysis of it would alone fill a pamphlet. It gives all tenants for life, or if he be an infant his trustees or guardians, or if a lunatic his committee, or if a married woman entitled to the separate use, such married woman, whether restrained from anticipation or not, full power of selling, exchanging or partitioning their lands or any part of them, and conveying the property without the consent of the trustees, very large power of leasing for agricultural, building and mining purposes, and in connection with any sale or lease of building land power to require the laying out of streets, or open spaces, &c., and power to mortgage any part of the land to raise money for enfranchisement, or equality of partition. All these powers of leasing, with the exception of granting ordinary agricultural leases, would have been impossible before the Act, (except in the cases in which they were provided for by the settlement), without the expense and delay of a petition to the Court. The purposes to which the purchase money received on a sale may be employed are as various as could be desired, and include the discharge of encumbrances, the redemption of land tax, the adjustment of partitions and exchanges, the enfranchisement of copyholds, the purchase of freeholds or copyholds, or the reversion to leaseholds, and even the