THE REVOLUTION IN THE LAND LAWS.
" WE are all Liberals now," has become a common- place at Conservative gatherings. That the phrase is no mere rhetorical flourish, but expresses an actual fact, no further proof is needed than the new clauses of the Land-Transfer Bill, which has just been reintroduced into the House of Lords by the Chancellor. When it is proposed by such a statesman as Lord Halsbury to effect a complete revolution in the conditions under which landed property is held in England, well may the Liberal Unionists boast that the alliance with them has transfigured the old Tory Party, and rendered it no less progressive and reform- ing than that which is led by Mr. Gladstone. A few years ago, the notion that the law in regard to realty ought to remain different from that which governs other forms of property, in order that the territorial aristocracy might be preserved, was still widely held, and able men were found to defend the medisevalisms of our legal system, on the ground that they enabled the great county families to keep their estates together. Now, however, it is practically impossible to find any one who is willing to undertake the defence of the custom of primogeniture, or to argue that if a man dies intestate, the law should hand over his land to one son alone, and exclude the rest of the family. If a man does not choose to say how his real property is to go on his death, let it be distributed on the same impartial plan pursued in the case of his money, and let it not be assumed that he wants " to make an eldest son." That is a feeling which at the present day is as general among Conservatives as Gladstonians.
The absurdity of the attempt, still occasionally made, to represent the Home-rule portion of the Liberal Party as holding a monopoly of land-reform, is proved more strongly by the subsidiary provisions of the Land-Transfer Bill than by the clauses which give it its title. It is no doubt a matter of great consequence to establish a good system of registration, but no scheme of the kind can for a moment compare in importance with the virtual assimila- tion of the tenure of real and personal property which will be secured if Lord Halsbury's Bill is passed into law. The means by which it is proposed to produce results so momentous are as follows. To begin with, after the Bill passes, land will, on the death of the owner, de- volve to his personal representatives, as if it were a chattel. At the present moment, the persons charged with the duty of administering a dead man's real estate are not necessarily the same as those who represent him in regard to his personal property, a condition of things at once anomalous and inconvenient. Still more important is the clause which in effect abolishes primogeniture in cases of intestacy. Under it, the landed property of the man who dies without a will must be divided in the same way as his personal property, except that his wife will first take a life- interest in the whole of such land, instead of half or a third of it absolutely—the husband of a wife who dies in- testate obtaining a similar privilege. The far-reaching results of this change in the law may be recognised by taking a hypothetical case. Lord A owns in fee-simple a great country house and an estate in a ring-fence of ten thousand acres, and possesses also £100,000 worth of Con- sols. He dies intestate, leaving a wife and two nephews and two nieces, the sons and daughters of his only brother, and so his next-of-kin. At the present time, the estate would go to the eldest nephew, subject to the wife's dower,—that is, to a life-interest in a third of the estate. The Consols would be divided into two equal portions, one half going to the widow, the other being divided equally among the nephews and nieces. When Lord Halsbury's Bill has become law, the result will be very different. In the first place, the widow will take the whole estate for her life—acquiring therewith, under the Settled Land Act, the power to sell the whole property except the principal mansion-house and grounds—as well as half the Consols. Again, as things now stand, when the widow dies, her third-part in the estate would revert to the heir,—that is, to the eldest nephew. If the proposed changes take place, the whole estate, including the house, when the widow dies will be divided into four equal parts, and distributed among the next-of-kin. No doubt it will be argued that the actual effect of the alteration in the law will be small, because great landowners, as a matter of fact, never do die intestate. Still, admitting this, we believe that the change will have very far-reaching results. In the first place, a great many small landowners do die intestate, and the amendment will do away with many very real cases of hardship. But more important than this, the law, as Mr. Brodrick pointed out long ago in his essay for the Cobden Club, acts very strongly as an example to testators. Many men are decided in their determination to leave their land to the eldest son, because they know that if they simply do nothing, it is the eldest son who will succeed. No doubt the great estates will not be broken up owing to the growth of a public sentiment in favour of a division analogous to the law of distribution on intestacy, for in such cases the custom of the family will prevail. Among the smaller landowners, however, and among those who have only recently acquired their estates, we can hardly believe that a tendency to model their wills in accordance with the provisions of Lord Halsbury's Bill will not gradually come into operation. Men will learn generally that land has practically become money in the sight of the law, and this being so, will hesitate to make a distinction between the two in their wills. "I am not going to leave Dick all my money, why should I leave him all the land ?" is a sort of logic which will very easily affect the minds of testators. We cannot, in the space at our disposal, discuss the other amendments to the law of real property sought to be made by the new measure, such as those which provide that henceforth the personal representatives of any deceased person shall have the same powers and be subject to the same liabilities in respect of real as of personal estate ; which abolish " all existing modes, rules, and canons of descent and of devolution by special occupancy ;" which do away with tenancy by the courtesy of England, dower, and free bench ; or which forbid the creation of estates tail in the future, and enlarge existing estates tail into estates in fee- simple. It may be remarked, however, that these pro- visions so round off and complete the work of reform as in practice to bring about that consummation so long and so devoutly wished for by all Land Law reformers,—the assimilation of real and personal property.
That the present Government is very much in earnest in its desire to pass Lord Halsbury's Bill, cannot be doubted for a moment. Whether they will succeed or not, is, however, another matter. Unfortunately, they are face to face with an Opposition eager to talk wildly and strongly about reform, but by no means anxious to enact substantial and reasonable measures. It is not too much to say that Mr. Labouchere and the large body of Members who follow him would far rather defeat a measure of reconstruction, however Radical in its nature, than allow the Ministry to get the credit of having passed it into law. It may seem strange, but is none the less true, that the party which in the present House of Commons throws difficulties in the way of and defeats reform is not the Tory, but the Gladstonian portion of the Liberal Party. We may feel certain that all its energies will be exerted to defeat the present Bill. But if the irreconcilables triumph in such a policy, will it really win them support in the country ? In our opinion, it will not. Throughout England there are a large number of men keenly interested in Land Law reform, —men who want to see the changes they have so long advocated made in their own lifetimes. These men watch political events very closely, and will not be taken in by the specious explanation that the measure was defeated because it did not go far enough. Unless we are very much mistaken, an effectual opposition to the Land- Transfer Bill will, in the end, prove far more detrimental to the Glaclstonians than to the Conservatives.
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