The third division (nearly fifty pages in all), on Private Law, summarises the Roman law of property, and compares the usages of Scotland and England. Smith had evidently consulted many law reports and statutes as well as some of the standard authorities in both kingdoms, such as Lord Kames’s _Law Tracts_, Dalrymple’s _Feudal Property_, Bacon’s _New Abridgment of the Law_, and Hawkins’s _Pleas of the Crown_. Smith was wonderfully free from legal obsessions. He condemned the excessive punishments of his time, and explained that they were founded not upon regard to public utility, but upon the spectator’s resentment against the offender and his sympathy with the injured party. The English laws of real property he regarded as unnatural and mischievous. He had mastered the theory of entail without being fascinated by it. “Upon the whole, nothing can be more absurd than perpetual entails. Piety to the dead can only take place when their memory is fresh in the minds of men; a power to dispose of estates for ever is manifestly absurd. The earth and the fulness of it belongs to every generation, and the preceding one can have no right to bind it up from posterity; such extension of property is quite unnatural.” A similar but less pithy condemnation appears in the _Wealth of Nations_, and was one of the passages which led Cobden to declare shortly before his death that if he were a young man he would take Adam Smith in hand, and preach free trade in land as he had formerly preached free trade in corn. Having considered “man as a member of a state, as a member of a family, and as a man,” Smith turned to Police, which is “the second general division of Jurisprudence.” At that time the word “police” was only half-way on its voyage from Greece. It “properly signified the policy of civil government, but now it only means the regulation of the inferior parts of government, viz. cleanliness, security, and cheapness or plenty.” “Cleanliness,” ninety years before the first Public Health Act, was only “the proper method of carrying dirt from the street,” while the term “security” exactly corresponded with police in the modern sense, being defined by Adam Smith as “the execution of justice, so far as it regards regulations for preventing crimes or the method of keeping a city guard.”