times. "On the contrary, any portion of the future revenue yielded by the skilled industry of a nation may be sold, and consequently an addition to the national skill gives a proportional addition to the command of national resources, to meet any sudden emergency. The produce of the general industry of Great Britain stands mortgaged for a sum which it would have appeared, a century ago, utterly impossible to conceive that industry could sustain, because, a century ago, it was impossible to conceive the vast increase which has been made to the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it was then directed." *

The considerations that have now been presented tend to show, that the tax imposed upon a community by any protective duty that falls short of a prohibition, is a very light one, as a considerable portion of it is paid by the foreign producers, and reappears in the additional price received for exports; that it keeps up the rate of wages, and enlarges the field for the employment of capital; that it prevents the business of agriculture from being so overdone as to render raw material the only article of export, and to depress the price of this so low that, though the people have a rude abundance of food and other mere necessaries, they are deprived of most of the comforts and elegances of life; that so far as the duty bears only upon articles of luxury and ostentation, the tax is really paid by nobody, but is a creation of public revenue out of a mere change in the fashions and tastes of the rich; that a protective system is needed only while the people are going through a period of apprenticeship in manufactures, and can be removed as soon as the necessary skill and experience have been obtained, when the cost of the commodities will be less than it would have been if the duty had never been imposed; and that its general effect is to stimulate invention, to multiply the productive arts, and to enlarge the sources of national opulence.

But on this great question between free trade and a protective policy, these arguments relating only to pecuniary loss or gain do not merit so much notice as the considerations which were mentioned in the eighth chapter of this work, respecting the devotion of the greater part of the people to

* Rae's New Principles of Political Economy, pp. 61, 62.

skilled or rude labor, and their consequent collection in towns and cities, or wide dispersion over the face of the country. Viewed in this light, I confess, the question seems to be one between progress in civilization and the arts, or a gradual return, I will not say to barbarism, but to that very imperfect stage of civilization which exists in all countries where the population are almost exclusively devoted to agriculture. The best legislative policy is that which will most effectually develop all the natural advantages of a country, whether mental or material. It is as wasteful, to say the least, to allow mechanical skill and inventive genius to remain unemployed, as it would be to permit water-power to run without turning mills, or mineral wealth to continue in the ore, or forests to wave where cotton and grain might grow luxuriantly. If the rude labor of husbandry is to form the principal employment of the people, the higher remuneration of skilled labor in the arts must be sacrificed; and this would be as bad economy as to turn our richest soils into sheep-pastures, or to feed cattle upon the finest wheat. The dispersion of the inhabitants over vast tracts of territory in the isolated pursuits of agriculture, the great majority of them being doomed to work which would not tax the mental resources of a Russian serf or a Feejee-Islander, must be fatal, not only to the growth of wealth, but to many of the higher interests of humanity. hardships and privations of a life in the backwoods are a fearful drawback upon that bounty which confers as a free gift a homestead farm with a soil that reproduces the seed a hundredfold. To give full scope to all the varieties of taste, genius, and temperament; to foster inventive talent; to afford adequate encouragement to all the arts, whether mechanical, or those which are usually distinguished as the fine arts; to concentrate the people, or to bring as large a portion of them as possible within the sphere of the humanizing influences and larger means of mental culture and social improvement which can be found only in cities and large towns; these are objects which deserve at least as much attention as the inquiry where we can purchase calicoes cheapest, or how great pecuniary sacrifice must be made before we can manufacture railroad iron for ourselves. I see not how these ends can be obtained in a country like ours, which is, so to speak, cursed

The

with great advantages for agriculture, emigration, and the segregation of the people from each other, without throwing over our manufacturing industry, at least for half a century to come, the broad shield of an effective protecting tariff. We shall need this shield only while we are passing through the term of our pupilage and apprenticeship, which, for a nation, of course, is always a protracted one; we shall need it, to adopt Burke's phrase, only while we are in the gristle, and have not yet hardened into the bone, of manhood. When we have enjoyed, as England has already enjoyed, the benefit of a strict protective policy for over a century, for the purpose of completing our education in manufactures, then we shall be ready to do what England at last has done, - to throw down all barriers, and to invite the world to compete with us in the application of industry and skill to any enterprise designed to satisfy the wants of man.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF PROPERTY AS AFFECTED BY THE LAWS REGULATING THE SUCCESSION TO THE ESTATES OF PERSONS DECEASED.

THE question respecting the distribution of property, which has chiefly been discussed only in the abstract by politicians and Political Economists, has now become one of practical interest and of the gravest importance. The sacredness of the institution has been generally recognized. That the accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals was indispensable, in order that the aggregate property of the nation might increase, and for the maintenance of order, the prevention of endless disputes, the encouragement of industry and enterprise, and the promotion of all the higher interests of society, was a fact that few were bold enough to deny. The inheritor of an estate usually claims it even as a natural right; he seldom thinks of defending his possession of it merely on the ground

of general expediency. He holds that he is indebted for it, not to government, or legislation, or the general consent of the community, but to those general principles of morality and natural law which protect his person and insure him the free use of his faculties and his time. Consequently, he invokes the aid of the law, the assistance of society, whenever he is molested in the enjoyment of his property. His doctrine is, that government did not give it to him, but that government is bound to take good care that he be not unjustly deprived of it.

Yet nothing is more certain than that all inherited property is actually enjoyed by the gift of law and the consent of society. A natural right is not limited by the boundaries of states; yet a second son in France claims an equal share of his parent's real estate, in the same manner, and for the same reason, that the eldest son in England claims the whole. An American is entitled to dispose of his whole property by will, according to his own judgment or caprice; he may endow a college or a cat with it, if he sees fit, to the total exclusion of his natural heirs. But this posthumous privilege, this postmortem enjoyment of wealth, is strictly limited in France; if a testator has one child, he can dispose of but half of his property; if he has two children, only a third, and if three, only a fourth, of his estate is subject to his own will. The respective shares of the sons and daughters are accurately determined, and a man cannot, even by gift during his lifetime, do anything to contravene the effect of this law. Now, as most of the wealth of a country, in the course of a single generation, must descend by inheritance or bequest, and as this descent is everywhere regulated by legislation, it follows that inherited property is the creature of law; its distribution is effected by government, or by the general consent of society, and is regulated by considerations of expediency alone. It sounds strange, but it is true, that the same authority which in England upholds the right of primogeniture, and in Scotland gives the privilege of perpetual entail, and in France deprives a testator of the power of giving away more than a small fraction of his property by will, might, with equal justice, decree that a man's whole estate on his decease should escheat to the state, or come under the disposal of the legislature, to be applied equally for the benefit of the whole nation. The legisla

tive power does not enact that the whole people shall be equal and joint heirs of all property which is vacated by death, simply because it believes that it is more for the interest of the whole people that the estate should be inherited only by the children of the deceased, or should descend exclusively to the oldest son. The law which disinherits five children out of one family for the benefit of the sixth, is surely competent to deprive the sixth also of his inheritance; if it leaves but one fourth of the estate to the caprice of the testator, it may destroy the efficacy of wills altogether.

It is true, that some considerations of justice and natural right come in to limit the general authority of law. The property which a man does not inherit, but actually creates by his own industry, seems to be his own by a higher and stronger title than any which society can confer. But it is no infringement of his right to say, that his power over the valuable article thus produced by him shall cease at his death; for the only superiority of his title consists in the fact that he, the possessor of the property, was also its creator, and one who only inherits it from its first owner cannot urge this plea; to defend the absolute right of the heir, would be to maintain that a right by inheritance is equal to one by creation, and thus to destroy the original claim of superiority of title. Absolute ownership, however sacred for the time, necessarily terminates at the death of the individual; society deprives him of nothing that is his own, when it refuses him testamentary power, because nothing that belongs to earth can be enjoyed beyond the grave, and he who has nothing can be deprived of nothing.

Again, the rightful authority of the legislature over the descent of property is limited by the trusts and expectations that have been created by immemorial usage and the previously existing state of the law. The conduct, the hopes, the calculations of men, are regulated by the customs of the country, by the assumed sanctity of prescription, and by long established institutions. The laws which regulate the descent of property are fundamental in their character; they are classed with the first principles of the constitution, like those which determine the form of the executive government, whether it shall be republican, aristocratic, or monarchical; and, excepting insignificant changes of forms and details, they are never altered but