All of those who were favored with prosperity remained at home, and they were largely the first-born sons, or entailed heirs. The underlings cleared out to the wild-woods. How could the mother country expect, therefore, conformity to her system of aristocratic estates, if those who sought the Colonies left home smarting under the inequality shown to the younger sons? The laws of Britain had, through generations, elevated the first-born and pauperized the junior offspring, till at last the American Revolution could with propriety be named the uprising of the younger sons of Britain for equality. Can Englishmen wonder, therefore, to-day, that Americans have no patience with English aristocracy and royalty? Any statesman who would emulate English social systems in America may be prepared for an avalanche. However, there is one relic of old England’s musty law tomes with which the younger sons may again have to measure swords, if not settled by peaceful and constitutional means. That is a law analogous to the law of entailed estates, which maintains inequality in like manner between individuals. The growth has been gradual and unseen until recent years; but at the same time producing rumblings in the hearts of the unfavored persons. _Primogeniture_ maintained inequality between brothers and sisters in the family; the other creates an inequality in finance and commerce, _in perpetuo_, by means of an artificial person, endowed with a legal immortality which destroys all individualism. That fiction of vested rights is the stock corporation under the genius and authority of the Common Law of England. No matter how safe Americans may feel against the introduction of aristocratic laws and forms of government, still, spasmodically and industriously, attempts have been made to supplant the idea of equality before the law, by legislation for the favored ones. The mission of Roderick Barclugh to the new world was to crush out the struggle for liberty by means of bribery and at the same time to imitate those laws of England, which would bind the social conditions of England upon the Colonists forever. Against the rebels, the outcome of the War for Independence seemed such a foregone conclusion, that already Roderick Barclugh was scheming to advance his own social prestige which his zeal for the King of England promised. He expected to be Viceroy of the Colonies, and to receive the title of Lord Barclugh of Allegheny. The matter had been so far decided and planned that the letter to Arnold explicitly stated that the Parliament of the Colonies would have an upper house of Lords of the Realm who were to receive their patents of nobility from the King of England. The thought of independence was ridiculed by the English; so what could more properly occupy the thoughts of Barclugh than his exalted position when England should subdue the rebels?