Predecessor

“ Again, the act says that the term 'predecessor' 'shall denote the settlor, disponer, testator, obligor, ancestor, or other person from whom the interest of the successor is or shall be derived.' From whom, then , is the interest derived? ”

“ In receiving from the people the sacred trust twice confided to my illustrious predecessor, and which he has discharged so faithfully and so well, I know that I can not expect to perform the arduous task with equal ability and success. ”

“ This observation will apply to each succession of kings, who, from vanity and a desire of distinction, will in general studiously avoid any step which may lead to a suspicion that they are so spiritless as to imitate their predecessor. ”

“ In praise of king Wû, walking in the ways of his forefathers, and by his filial piety securing the throne to himself and his posterity.
Successors tread in the steps (of their predecessors) in our Kâu.
For generations there had been wise kings;
The three sovereigns were in heaven [1] ;
And king (Wû) was their worthy successor in his capital [2] .
King (Wû) was their worthy successor in his capital,
Rousing himself to seek for the hereditary virtue,
Always striving to be in accordance with the will (of Heaven) ”

“ All rising to great place is by a winding star; and if there be factions, it is good to side a man's self, whilst he is in the rising, and to balance himself when he is placed. Use the memory of thy predecessor, fairly and tenderly ”

“ Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story upon the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. ”

“ for your lords are readier to feed idle people than to take care of the sick; and often the heir is not able to keep together so great a family as his predecessor did. ”

“ He puts a few questions, which I am in some pain to answer. "Cannot," says he, "the successors be excellent men, unless the predecessors be villains? cannot the queen change her ministers, but they must presently be such as neither God nor man can endure? do noblemen fall from all honour, virtue, and religion, because they are so unhappy as to fall from their prince's favour?" ”

“ How can we, your lowly descendant, not conform to the spirit of the time and thus guard the domain bequeathed by our ancestors? How venture not to strenuously exert ourselves and stiffen and anneal us in order to add lustre to the virtues of our predecessors. ”

“ For the sake of simplicity I have called the mode of succession Primogeniture whenever a single son or descendant succeeds to the authority over a household or society. It is remarkable, however, that in the few very ancient examples which remain to us of this sort of succession, it is not always the eldest son, in the sense familiar to us, who takes up the representation. The form of Primogeniture which has spread over Western Europe has also been perpetuated among the Hindoos, and there is every reason to believe that it is the normal form. ”

“ Under it, not only the eldest son, but the eldest line is always preferred. If the eldest son fails, his eldest son has precedence not only over brothers but over uncles; and, if he too fails, the same rule is followed in the next generation. ”

“ But if from any bodily or mental defect the eldest son is disqualified for ruling, the father determines in his lifetime which of his sons shall succeed him. In order, however, to establish his right of succession, it is necessary that the son upon whom his father’s choice falls shall catch in his mouth or in a bag the last breath, and with it the soul, of the dying chief. ”

“ Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. ”

“ We do for us our heirs and successors make, ordain, constitute and confirm by these presents, and that by that name they shall have perpetual succession, and that by that name they and their successors shall be capable and enabled as well to implead and to be impleaded, and to prosecute, demand and answer and be answered unto all and singular suits, causes, quarrels and actions of what kind or nature soever ”

“ He reminded I-jên that, as simply one of a numerous family of children, his present prospects of ever coming to the throne were absolutely nil. The old King could not live much longer; the heir-apparent, then a man in the prime of life, would immediately succeed him, and his choice of a successor would probably fall on one or other of his elder sons. ”

“ Bracton, who wrote in the thirteenth century, tells us of the law of succession in his time. He says: ‘Of kinship and of relationship some are upwards and others are downwards, and others are travers or sidewards. Ancestors succeed on failure of those below them. ”

“ We understand that we are to be made kings and Priests unto God; now if I be made the king and lawgiver to my family, and if I have many sons, I shall become the father of many fathers, for they will have sons, and their sons will have sons, and so on, from generation to generation, and, in this way, I may become the father of many fathers, or the king of many kings. ”

“ The heir expectant of some tenacious ancestor might thus dispose of the drowsy and unprofitable interval. The gentleman of petite fortune might suffer it to accumulate, in the hands of trustees, and wake up, after twenty or thirty years, a man of affluence. ”

“ Succession implies time; the lower members of a series of sedimentary rocks are certainly older than the upper; and when the notion of age was once introduced as the equivalent of succession, it was no wonder that correspondence in succession came to be looked upon as correspondence in age, or "contemporaneity." ”

“ There is, to be sure, another frequent way of describing our consciousness of succession, — and a way that on the whole I find unsatisfactory. According to this view, events come to us in succession in our experience, — let us say the words of a spoken verse, — and then something often called the synthetic activity of the mind supervenes, and later binds together into unity, these successive facts, so that when this binding has taken place we then recognize the whole fagot of experience as a single succession. ”

“ But he had arrived at an age when it was necessary to think of an heir; at an age, too, when the uneasy consciousness began to grow within him that if he desired an heir, there was no time to be lost. ”

“ As therefore hereditary succession is out of the question, with respect to the first generation, we have next to consider the character in which that generation acts towards the commencing generation and to all succeeding ones. ”

“ This great event does not hinder us from carrying our views beyond the time present, and when our succession appears the best established, we judge it to be equally the duty of a King, and of a Father, to declare for the future our will conformably to the sentiments which these two qualities inspire in us. ”

“ It is true, that if we consider the triumph and delight with which most of those recount their ancestors, who have ancestors to recount, and the artifices by which some who have risen to unexpected fortune endeavour to insert themselves into an honourable stem, we shall be inclined to fancy that wisdom or virtue may be had by inheritance, or that all the excellencies of a line of progenitors are accumulated on their descendant. ”

“ I am possessed of many abilities and arts, which fit me to serve spiritual beings. Your great descendant, on the other hand, has not so many abilities and arts as I, and is not so capable of serving spiritual beings. And moreover he was appointed in the hall of God to extend his aid all over the kingdom, so that he might establish your descendants in this lower earth. The people of the four quarters all stand in reverent awe of him. ”

“ The history opens, representing a scene crowded with all the monuments of avarice, and laying before us a most beautiful contrast, such as is too general in the world, to pass unobserved; nothing being more common than for a son to prodigally squander away that substance his father had, with anxious solicitude, his whole life been amassing.—Here, we see the young heir, at the age of nineteen or twenty, raw from the University, just arrived at home, upon the death of his father. ”

“ Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he is lord of all; 2 But is under tutors and governors until the time appointed by the father. 3 Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: [7] 4 But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, 5 To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. 6 And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. ”

“ The remotest known ancestor of each compounding group, at once the most ancient father and the god of the compound group, being continuously represented in blood, as well as in power, by the eldest descendant of the eldest, it happens that this patriarch, who is head not of his own group only but also of the compound group, stands to both in a relation analogous to that in which the apotheosized ancestor stands ”

“ On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on. ”

“ Their long reigns, the first ten of which embrace a period of two centuries and a half, their peaceful deaths, and unbroken line of succession in the same family for so many years, show that their authority must have been founded in the affections of their subjects. ”

“ An earldom, in abeyance for five centuries, has suddenly been assumed by some commoner, to whom it had not so much descended as through the art of the lawyers been made flexibly to bend in that direction. ”

“ A certain King had three sons who were all equally dear to him, and he did not know which of them to appoint as his successor after his own death. When the time came when he was about to die, he summoned them to his bedside and said, "Dear children, I have been thinking of something which I will declare unto you; whichsoever of you is the laziest shall have the kingdom." ”

“ The claim of an heir to rank depends upon his power to reproduce, letter perfect, his family chants and his "name song," composed to celebrate his birth, and hence exact transmission is a matter of extreme importance. ”

“ The joinder of times is given to those who succeed to the place of another. Ulpian cites a like phrase from a jurisconsult of the time of the Antonines,—"to whose place I have succeeded by inheritance, or purchase, or any other right." /2/ Succedere in locum aliorum, like sustinere personam, is an expression of the Roman lawyers for those continuations of one man's legal position by another of which the type was the succession of heir to ancestor. ”

“ No parchments, however venerable with the mold of ages, no human institutions, can bound the immortal wants of the royal sons and daughters of the great I Am—rightful heirs of the joys of time and joint heirs of the glories of eternity. ”

“ But in a settled and cultivated country, and among an advanced people, we maintain succession by primogeniture to be the most consonant, as a matter of theory, to the social feelings and requirements of man ”

“ The more despotically the father ruled in the ancient family, the more must the son have taken the position of an enemy, and the greater must have been his impatience, as designated successor, to obtain the mastery himself after his father's death. ”

“ Often, too, the desired successor gains but envy for his share of the inheritance, and by his sudden death hands over the whole amount of the succession, which he has hardly entered upon, to strangers. ”

“ There had been a wondrous involution from centuries of great history, according to subtle, silent laws of hereditary inheritance, in very blood and life, of tone, and quality, and temper, and now there is evolved, evoked, just that of power which tells of kinship with those who have gone before. ”

“ We bear the impress, at this hour, of the great thoughts and high aspirations, the struggles, and even the crimes, of our ancestral ages; and yet they have no greater resemblance to the present, except in the unchangeable characteristics of human nature itself, than the remotest forefathers in a long line of ancestry, whose likenesses hang in the galleries of our hereditary nobles, bear to the existing owner of title and estate. ”

“ This natural law of succession, accordingly, took place among the Romans who made no more distinction between elder and younger, between male and female, in the inheritance of lands, than we do in the distribution of moveables. ”

“ To the aristocracy I would say, forget your ancestors, throw away your titles and every outward sign of courtly favour, and we will promise you to be generous and efface every remembrance of our ancestors. Let us be children of one father, brothers of one family! ”

“ All > Although
5 Yet is eterne in mutability,
is eterne > [he is eternal]
6 And by succession made perpetual, 7 Transformed oft, and changed diversely: 8 For him the father of all forms they call; 9 Therefore needs might he live, that living gives to all. ”