We have adverted to the connection between the petty territorial system and the law of inheritance. If we could suppose the whole surface of England were to be parcelled out to-morrow into small holdings, and then placed in the hands of labouring men, it is clear that, while enterprise and the spirit of accumulation were left as free as at present, the whole arrangement would be upset before the end of the twelvemonth; and that, in a few generations at furthest, property would be found gathered into large masses, just as it is now. Some artificial means, then, would be necessary for limiting the liberty of disposing of property--some such contrivance as the compulsory law of equal succession in France and the Provinces of the Rhine--to provide against the possibility of the landowner ever becoming wealthy, and rising above the condition of a peasant. But are we prepared for all the consequences to which an equal partition of the land among the children of the peasant proprietor would inevitably lead, and has to a great extent already led in those countries? In communities such as Norway, where equal inheritance has grown up with the old institutions of the nation, and all their domestic customs are intimately connected with it, its evil effects are in a great measure neutralised by traditionary usages, which supply the place of law, and prevent the subdivision of property from reaching a dangerous extreme. But national customs cannot be adopted _extempore_; and the experience of France is surely a sufficient proof of the danger of attempting factitiously to adapt that system of succession to the habits and institutions of an old and highly civilised nation. And yet, without some such restriction of the freedom of testation, peasant-proprietorship, as a permanent social principle, is impossible. It is becoming every day more apparent, that the compulsory subdivision of landed property is the main source of the restless and disorganised condition of the French population. The sons of the peasant proprietor spend their youth in the labours of the farm, and look to the land alone as the means of their subsistence. The acre or two that must fall legally to their share at the death of their father is regarded as a sufficient provision against the chance of indigence; and they rarely think of seeking employment in other industrious occupations, or of applying themselves steadily to a trade. The consequence is, that at that age which, in our country, is the prime of a working man's life, they find themselves left to the bare subsistence they can scrape from their miserable inheritance--without regular occupation, unfit for mercantile pursuits, and ripe for war and social tumult. Is it possible to imagine a condition more fitted to foster that reckless and turbulent military spirit--ever ready to burst the barriers of constitutional law--which lies at the root of France's social calamities? Subdivision of land property and