In this country we have abolished the law of primogeniture, by which the eldest son inherited the landed estate of his ancestor, but here vast estates are being rapidly accumulated in few hands, and this is especially true during and since the War of the Rebellion. In 1860 there were few millionaires and few large fortunes in this country, but since then a rich class has sprung up, so that in 1890, according to reliable statistics, ten per cent. of the people own as much wealth as the other ninety per cent. In 1890 there were 12,690,182 families in the United States, and according to George K. Holmes, in the _Political Science Quarterly_, 4,047 of these possessed about seven-tenths as much as do 11,593,887 families. Just think of it. One family possessing the wealth of 2,000 families the country over! In the city of New York alone there are said to be five men whose aggregate wealth exceeds $500,000,000. How many hundred millions are held by various wealthy corporations, coal and oil syndicates and other trusts, I am unable to state. In the cities of New York and Chicago hundreds of thousands of men and women, willing to work, were out of employment last winter, many of whom must have perished from want but for charity’s aid. These conditions another winter promise to be no better. The richest corporations and persons on earth are probably in the United States. How have they accumulated their vast fortunes? Surely not by their own industry and thrift, but by the aid of statutes regulating the rights of property, generally statutes providing for the transmission of property by descent or by will, or the creation of monopolies. It is only by virtue of statutory law that man is permitted to make disposition of his property by will, and it is only by virtue of statutory law that one person is permitted to inherit property from another, and it is by virtue of statute law that great corporate monopolies have been built up. No man has a natural right to dispose of property after death, nor has one person a natural right to inherit property from another. As Blackstone says: “There is no foundation in nature or in natural law why the son should have the right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of land because his father did so before him, or why the occupier of a particular field or of a jewel, when lying on his death-bed, and no longer able to maintain possession, should be able to tell the rest of the world which of them should enjoy it after him.”