Now it is obvious that it is for the enormous convenience of business to have business documents made negotiable. If a banker can loan on a bill of lading or a warehouse receipt, or a trader can buy the same, or if a man can give a trust receipt to his banker agreeing that all his general shipments or stock in trade shall be the property of that banker until his debt is paid, it makes enormously for the rapid turning over of capital, and the extension of credit. Of course, an enormous proportion of business in the United States is conducted upon credit, and without the invention of the negotiable instrument those credits could not be secured without an actual delivery of the commodities intended to secure them. And the custom of business is to consider most such documents negotiable even when in fact they are not so. It is more than usual to loan money upon warehouse receipts, bills of lading, stock certificates or trust receipts of all descriptions, regardless of the question whether the law of the State makes them negotiable. Hence the very great tendency to make such instruments negotiable by statute; and I find many such laws, beginning in 1893 in North Carolina, as to warehouse receipts, while the Massachusetts statute concerning stock dates from 1884. A reaction to the English common law is the statute, common in recent years, prohibiting sales in bulk. It appears to have been a growing custom for merchants, particularly retail merchants, when in financial difficulties to sell their entire stock in trade to some professional purchaser by a simple bill of sale without physical delivery. Nearly all States have adopted statutes against this practice, although in several they have been held unconstitutional. The feeling that they are dishonest is doubtless justified by the facts; but it may also be truly described as a reaction to the simpler English law as against Oriental innovations. The descent of property throughout the United States is regulated by English common-law ideas. That is to say, there is no primogeniture, although in early colonial times the older son took a double portion; and there is, except in Louisiana, complete liberty of testamentary disposition, although in one or two other States there have been statutes forbidding a man to dispose of all his estate to a charity within a short time previous to his death, to the prejudice at least of his direct heirs. The Code Napoleon, of course, limits testamentary disposition in favor of these latter, so in Louisiana, only half of a man's estate can be given away from his children or widow, and not more than three-fourths of his estate can be bequeathed to strangers or to charity, to the prejudice even of collateral heirs.