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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
in all , the independent feelings of suitors , -whoever may be included under that name , must be sacrificed . If the younger brothers of a man of landed property , for instance , are to be provided for , in either of the foregoing ways , patronage is indispensably necessary to their making any considerable progress , and patronage must be bought , or repaid by services rendered in
return , which are neither consistent with the respectability of the suitor , or good of the country . In the quarter from which favours are granted , subserviency in return will be expected ; and thus , by degrees , the government of a country , instead of being a government for all who pay for it , becomes in time a government for the comparatively few . So that , while political influence and services are bartered for place or promotion , abuses spring
up and multiply on all hands ; the reforms , which would cut off the sources of this unrighteous traffic , are , of course , objected to by both parties—patrons and satellites ; and reform resisted and obstinately protracted must , sooner or later , terminate in revolution . What an example and warning of this kind , * say the French apologists , * do not our own country furnish ! This description of abuses , ' add they , * can be adopted only on a limited
scale , whilst the present laws of descent remain inviolate ; ' but they are ready to admit that they form so material a check to the exercise of undue and corrupt influence , as must necessarily expose them to the hatred and hostility of arbitrary power . Accordingly it afforded no feeling of surprise , that these laws were tampered with , and would have been totally set aside , both by Louis XV 1 IL and the ex-king , but that the sensation created
by the apprehension of the attempt was too strong , the resistance too certain , and the consequences too threatening to be encountered . Whether this reasoning be correct or not , it must be allowed , that if the law in France usurps a portion of the authority which , some persons contend , every man should have , over the disposal of his property after his decease , it does not do so for the sake of depriving his family of any part thereof , and of
appropriating it to the uses of government . And it has been accordingly significantly asked , whether Englishmen who are accustomed , on the decease of their friends , to see the property of their families plundered , first , under the denomination of probate and administration duties , and the same property again a second time still more severely curtailed by the operation of a legacy tax , are quite consistent in exclaiming against the interference of a law
which fakes nothing from the family of the deceased , whilst it merely regulates the division of its property amongst the members of it ! By some persons , also , the morality of the right which a man assumes of disposing arbitrarily , whimsically , or unjustly , of what he calls his property , after he has done with it , is at least doubted . And after all , it might perhaps be difficult to distinguish the difference , in principle ^ between the English law which
Untitled Article
340 French Laws of Succession .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 340, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/52/
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