" AGRARIANS " AND HISTORIANS.*
AGRICULTURE in Germany, where the law of equal division of landed property at death in case of intestacy prevails, appears to be suffering as much as in England, where (subject to a few exceptions) the law of primogeniture carries the whole, in the like case, to a single heir. To the ordinary mind the con- clusion would seem to be that neither division nor indivision of the land at death can cause the distress. Bat the German mind is nothing if not extraordinary, and the " Agrarian " party—numbering in its ranks a late Prussian Finance Minister, Dr. Miguel— has put forth amongst its claims the establishment of Anobenrccht, which is, interpreted, the "right of single heirship." And, according to what appears to be the modern German axiom, " Omne bonum a Teutone," the next step has been to claim this as an essentially German principle. This has been too much for the quick, shrewd Italian blood coursing in the veins of the well-known Munich professor of political economy, Dr. Lujo Brentano. In an acutely reasoned pamphlet recently published he combats this view, though at the cost of entering the lists against an old friend and fellow-worker, Dr. Otto Gierke. And considering that the oldest authorities are dead against the contention—that Tacitus in his Germania exprcsely says that "each man's heirs and successors are his own children, and there is no will," adding that if there are no children the nearest of kin, brothers, uncles, nephews, inherit—that two or three centuries • Weber AneTbenrecht und Grundeigenthum. Von Lujo Brectano. Berlin : 0. Bath g.
later the codes of the German Kingdoms established on the ruins of the German Empire prescribe division of property at death, now amongst all the children, now amongst all the sons, it is not difficult for Professor Brentano to refute his agrarian adversaries on the historical ground. He proves conclusively not only that the "spirit of the German people" was originally that of divided, not of undivided, inheritance, but that the "right of the single heir" was introduced from bated France. It is somewhat singular that he should have omitted—in the case of so learned and acute a writer one cannot say overlooked—the additional argument against single heirship as characteristic of the German races afforded by our own country through the existence in Kent of the custom of " gavelkind," or of the inheritance of all the sons at death, which is held to have been the general law among the Anglo-Saxons, and which subsisted also after -the Norman conquest in a few detached manors, two of them Metropolitan ones. Thus here also single heirship was intro- duced from France. The agrarian reasoning appears to be : Single heirship is the right thing for agriculture ; argot it must be German ; argal it must be German immemorially. As for facts—Tara pis pcur lea faits.
It is curious to contrast the "agrarian " doctrine, as tending to confine the ownership of land to the few, with the tendency of our own legislation to break down the land monopoly, re- sulting from the law of single heirship, or, as it is termed, primo- geniture. Entails went first, and virtually subsist only in name under the rule that lands can only be tied up during " lives in being and twenty-one years afterwards," necessi- tating periodical resettlement on the majority of the next heir, if he consents to the revival of the process. Settled Estates Acts have greatly increased the powers of the tenant for life in possession. And over all landed property hang ever multiplying possibilities of compulsory purchase by bodies holding statutory powers to that effect,—what the French call "Expropriation pour cause d'utilite publique." Already, indeed, the equal division of real property in case of in- testacy has been applied to one class of holdings in Ireland by the Land - Purchase Act of 1891, and extends to all lands sold under the earlier Land - Purchase Acts, so that, as pointed out by Mr. Shaw-Lefevre in his work on Agrarian Tenures, "there will be henceforward the curious anomaly in Ireland that all land which has been at any time sold to tenants under the Land-Purchase Acts will be subject to one law of inheritance, and all other land to another law." This singular piece of legislation seems to have escaped Dr. Brentano's notice ; but he dwells upon the present Conservative Lord Chancellor's Bill of 1888, enacting the equal division of landed property at death in case of intestacy, which actually, strange to say, passed the Lords, to be rejected by the Commons, though in the following year, when the same proposal, accepted by the Commons, was sent up to the Lords by a Liberal Ministry, it was in turn rejected by the Upper House ; so that each House, in the plenitude of Parliamentary wisdom, has by turns sanctioned and denied, or denied and sanctioned, the principle of equal division of the land at death.
At the close of his pamphlet Professor Brentano mentions a curious fact of which be has had personal experience,—the existence to this day in Southern Tyrol of flourishing house- hold communities, in which the whole family, without even necessarily living together, forms a single co-partnership, income and outgo being in common, and he states that the families where this co-partnership exists are out and out the best off. But it is noticeable that the practice is con- fined to families of Italian race; in German ones "a strict Anerbenrecht" prevails, carrying with it a heavy weight of debt, just as with ourselves the heir to an entailed estate is often crippled by the but then of portions to younger children. (Dr. Breutano does not seem to observe that this fact gives some colour to Dr. Gierke's contention that the heirship of the one is German, as against the Latin heirship of the many, so far, at all events, as the present time is concerned.)
Apart from the question of equity, which must weigh in favour of divided heirship, it is obvious that both practices have their advantages and disadvantages. We see the evils of indivision in the swallowing-up of the small landowners by the large, in the often paralysing efftct of family burthens upon the latter. France and other continental States show us the evils of morc,lieznint in the stereotvnine of inferior methods of agriculture, the reducing of population by memo frequently not consonant with morality, the lowering of the peasant type. The only cure for the latter class of evils lies in co-operation, whether that of the family, as in those house- hold communities of Southern Tyrol which Dr. Brentano speaks of, or in those larger forms of co-operation in credit, manufacture, distribution, consumption which are typified by the Schulze-Delitzch or Raiffeisen societies of Germany or the people's banks of Italy, by the cheese-dairies of the Jura or the co-operative creameries of Denmark or Ireland, the agricultural syndicates of France and our own co-operative undertakings (the latest of which is Lord Winchelsea's British Produce Supply Association). The large size of our farms, no less than that of our estates, has hitherto hindered us from applying such methods on any large scale. But with the multiplication of allotments, and the tendency to limit the area of farm-holdings, it is probable that the habit of co-operation for agricultural purposes may spread, and it is not unlikely that when the equal division of real estate in case of intestacy becomes law—as to all appearance it must do before many years are over—we shall be better prepared to meet its disadvantages as well as to enjoy its benefits than we are now.
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