Hereditary privilege

“ It is likewise a common thing for women to bestow their fortunes on surviving husbands, by will. The right of primogeniture ceased with hereditary estates and titles; and all the children of a French family now inherit an equal share of their parents’ property. ”

“ This state of things is consolidated by the law of inheritance, whereby the instruments of production, which are private property, and all the attendant social advantages, are transmitted without regard to personal merit. The social disadvantages being also transmitted, misery becomes hereditary. ”

“ Other children may inherit money or equivalent personal property, and so long as it lasts the law will protect them in its use. Then they must apply, with the crowd born without inheritance, to those who possess the land, for the privilege of working in further support of life. ”

“ All that reason and justice require is effected, by setting bounds to such advantages, in denying hereditary claims to trusts and power; but evil would be the day, and ominous the symptom, when a people shall deny that any portion of the consideration of the ancestor is due to the descendant. ”

“ The perpetuation of hereditary defect is infinitely worse than murder. Consider, for example, a marriage, sanctioned by church and state, between two persons both having in their blood hereditary feeble-mindedness. ”

“ But his sons, to whom, by special imperial lenity, we grant their life—for those ought to perish by the same punishment as their father, whose portion is the example of a paternal, that is of a hereditary crime—shall be without share in any inheritance or succession from the mother or grandparents, or even from relatives; they shall receive nothing from other people's wills, and shall be always poor and in want; the infamy of their father shall always follow them, and they shall never achieve any honour or be allowed to take any oath at all ”

“ The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which attends hereditary possession, (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission. ”

“ There is yet a farther consequence of the corruption and extinction of hereditary blood, which is this: that the person attainted shall not only be incapable himself of inheriting, or transmitting his own property by heirship, but shall also obstruct the descent of lands or tenements to his posterity, in all cases where they are obliged to derive their title through him from any remoter ancestor. ”

“ For the rest, you know my descent is sufficiently recognized as that amidst well-born gentry to have rendered me no mesalliance to families the most proud of their ancestry, if I had kept my hereditary estate and avoided the career that makes me useful to man. ”

“ X. A Father, with his sonnes and servants growne into a civill Person by vertue of his paternall jurisdiction, is called a FAMILY. This family, if through multiplying of children, and acquisition of servants, it becomes numerous, insomuch as without casting the uncertain dye of warre, it cannot be subdued, will be termed an Hereditary Kingdome ”

“ The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father, and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than in a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence. ”

“ In some cases the hereditary factor is so clearly deficient as to make it natural and justifiable to regard heredity as the cause; in a much larger number of cases there is good reason to think that social conditions are more particularly to blame, and that the original hereditary outfit was fairly good. ”

“ The first of these is the fact of heredity; the second the fact that hereditary endowment, whether for good or for evil, or, as is the rule, both for good and for evil, goes vastly further than any one has until lately realized, in determining individual destiny. ”

“ As a natural result, inheritance became an important social factor; but so long as children belonged to the mother's gens they could not inherit from their father, however great his importance as a man of property. ”

“ In fact as in theory, there is in this country but one class of people. Such supposed barriers as wealth and political position are only partitions of paper—relative nothings. I do not mention heredity, because in the United States all attempts to establish a family line result in the family rotting before it gets ripe. The only pretence to hereditary pride which we have here, exists in two States; in one of them some four or five hundred persons cannot forget that their forefathers got to shore before somebody else ”

“ At the time I repudiated the false rumour openly;—with all the greater readiness, inasmuch as I dispute both the justice of hereditary honour and the wisdom of hereditary legislation; to say less of the "res angusta domi" which, in our Mammonite time and clime, obliges money to support rank, even if, as in sundry late cases of raising to the peerage, it does not purchase it. ”

“ But an ungrateful son ought not to obtain an inheritance; and rather than such, we should adopt a stranger. Therefore, since thou hast been ungrateful to thy father in maintaining me contrary to his command, thou shalt never possess my inheritance." The son thus answered his uncle. "No one can be punished for executing what the law commands and compels. Now the law of nature obliges children to assist their parents in necessity, and especially to honour them: therefore, I cannot justly be deprived of the inheritance." ”

“ In respect to our own great landholders themselves, we would ask, where is there that unnatural parent—that miserable victim of hereditary pride—who does not desire to see his domains equally divided among his own children? The high paid sinecures in church and state will not much longer be a great motive for keeping up a powerful family head, whose influence may burthen their fellow-citizens with the younger branches. ”

“ I saw it might be taken as a symbol of the part which is played in the general human lot by hereditary conditions in the largest sense, and of the fact that what we call duty is entirely made up of such conditions; for even in cases of just antagonism to the narrow view of hereditary claims, the whole background of the particular struggle is made up of our inherited nature. ”

“ The moment we begin to reason upon the hereditary system, it falls into derision; let but a single idea begin, and a thousand will soon follow. Insignificance, imbecility, childhood, dotage, want of moral character; in fine, every defect serious or laughable unite to hold up the hereditary system as a figure of ridicule. Leaving, however, the ridiculousness of the thing to the reflections of the reader, I proceed to the more important part of the question, namely, whether such a system has a right to exist. ”

“ And if neither father nor mother in whom these rights are vested, should leave any children, the entire inheritance shall be divided among the other descendants; but they shall not have the power to give to each grandchild more than the third part of the aforesaid property. ”

“ The doctrine of hereditary right does by no means imply an indefeasible right to the throne. No man will, I think, assert this, that has considered our laws, constitution, and history, without prejudice, and with any degree of attention. It is unquestionably in the breast of the supreme legislative authority of this kingdom, the king and both houses of parliament, to defeat this hereditary right; and, by particular entails, limitations, and provisions, to exclude the immediate heir, and vest the inheritance in any one else. ”

“ The law of inheritance for people of distinction differs from that of the kings in the fact that the eldest son inherits by right of primogeniture, and succeeds to all his father’s property, wives and slaves. He generally allows his mother a separate establishment and maintenance and finds employment and maintenance for his father’s other wives in the family residence. ”

“ If the law no longer heeds the age of any member of the family, can it not, by the right of heredity, cease to heed it in the race, in the tribe, in the nation?
“Can equality, by the right of succession, be preserved between citizens, as well as between cousins and brothers? In a word, can the principle of succession become a principle of equality?
“To sum up all these ideas in one inclusive question: What is the principle of heredity? What are the foundations of inequality? What is property?
“Such, gentlemen, is the object of the memoir that I offer you to day. ”

“ Whenever, by the laws of hereditary descent, in their application to health and disease, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren suffer, we may recognize in it the hand of the great Creator; nor do we doubt, often, the wisdom of such laws nor their ultimate tendency to work out final good. ”

“ While, when a nation is yet in the intermediate stages of civilization, the family right of inheritance seems to be very strong, especially as regards landed property, a consequence of the fact, that a superior kind of title to such property is recognized to exist in the family ”

“ No one can doubt the law of hereditary transmission. Our inherited and acquired characteristics are sure to be transmitted to our descendants. Indeed, so thoroughly does character permeate one's entire being that it might be said of each drop of blood that in its characteristics it is a miniature of the person in whose body it was secreted. Eminent characters do not emanate from degenerate parents; and neither is the reverse true, except as the result of adequate reversionary influences. ”

“ But I cannot bring myself to believe, that the hereditary principle, or, in more general terms, the sentiment of family, should be entirely excluded from the aristocratical part of the new social order, which, although yet wrapped in uncertainty and mystery, is now struggling into existence on both sides of the Atlantic. The sentiment of family is not becoming extinct. Like all other social institutions, the constitution of the family has undergone various changes, since the beginning of the historical period. ”

“ If his parents were natural born subjects, and capable to take as heirs of the deceased ancestor, it is clear that he could not inherit by descent through them, as they would intercept the title, as nearer heirs. The only cases in which he could inherit, living his parents, are those where the common law has prohibited the parents from taking, although they have inheritable blood. ”

“ The so-called noble family is not noble in the continental sense; privilege does not go on from generation to generation; titles and precedence are lost in the second or third generation; substantial privilege exists in only one member of the family at a time. ”

“ He knows exactly what inheritance he has to leave them; he knows that the law will divide it equally among them; he sees the limit beyond which this division would make them descend from the rank which he has himself filled, and a just family pride, common to the peasant and to the nobleman, makes him abstain from summoning into life, children for whom he cannot properly provide. If more are born, at least they do not marry, or they agree among themselves, which of several brothers shall perpetuate the family. ”

“ The necessity of providing a dot for daughters, and the subdivision of property by the law of inheritance, have made the family more powerful, as an institution, than in any other civilized country. In order that the family may prosper, it is kept small, and the individual members are often sacrificed to it. ”

“ It assuredly would not be an arbitrary exercise of power for a state to put in one class, for the purpose of inheritance or the burdening of the privilege to inherit, all blood relatives to a designated degree, excluding brothers and sisters, and to place all other and more remote blood relatives, including brothers and sisters, in a second class, along with strangers to the blood. ”

“ When the law of inheritance permits, still more when it decrees, the equal division of a father's property among all his children, its effects are of two kinds: it is important to distinguish them from each other, although they tend to the same end. ”

“ There remains the terminological difficulty that, as I have tried to show, the individual may display characters which were potential in the germ, inherent and necessarily inherited, though they did not appear in the parent nor yet in any ancestor. We have to face the paradox, then, that in natural inheritance a parent can transmit what he has not got, though this does not apply to the unnatural inheritance of property in human society. ”

“ Illegitimate children acknowledged by their fathers are 'natural children.' Natural children can take from their father by intestate succession 'to the exclusion only of the State.' They may be bequeathed property by their father only to the extent of either one-third or one-fourth of his estate and then only if their father is not survived by legitimate children or their heirs. ”

“ If the child of two parents has any property inherited from relatives, and that child dies before it is of age to make a will, or without making a will, the only person who inherits the property of that child is the child's father; the mother does not exist as her child's heir at all ”

“ Do we observe certain degrees of the intellectual faculties to be hereditary in certain families? The same observation has been frequently extended to moral qualities. Hence we often find certain virtues and vices as peculiar to families, through all their degrees of consanguinity, and duration, as a peculiarity of voice, complexion, or shape. ”