(1279) The Statute of Mortmain, aimed at the holding of land in large quantities by religious corporations, was a true constructive statute, and the principle it establishes has grown ever since. The law regards with jealousy the ownership of land by any corporation; the presumption is against the power, and it extends to-day to all corporations, and particularly to alien corporations (see chapter 7); and in 1283 came the Statute of Acton Burnel, re-enacted in 1285 and called the "Statute Merchant," equally important. It provides for the speedy recovery of debts due merchants, and is the foundation of all our modern law of pledge, sales of collateral, etc. It is distinctly an innovation on the common law; for in those days there was no method of collecting ordinary money debts. You could levy on a man's land, but there really seems to have been no method of recovering a debt contracted in trade; and this is the first of many statutes adopting foreign ideas as to matters of trade, and the customs of merchants, drawn frequently from the Lombard or Jew traders of the Continent, which, by statute law, custom, or court decision, has since become such a considerable body of the English law as to have a name to itself--the "Law Merchant." This first statute provides for imprisonment for debt; "if he have no goods to be seized the debtor is to be imprisoned, but the creditor shall find him bread and water." A foreigner coming to England to recover a debt may also recover the expenses of his trip; and the statute is further liberal in that it does away with the _Droit d'Aubaine_, that narrow-minded custom by which the goods or personal property of any person who died passing through the kingdom were seized by the authorities and could not be recovered by his heirs. This mediaeval injustice continued for some centuries in Germany and France, and we can hardly say that the notion is extinct in this country when a State like California, by her system of public administrators, practically impounds a large proportion of all personal property owned by non-residents at their death. Cases have been known where it cost the executor more than one-third of the money to collect a mortgage, owned by a deceased citizen of Massachusetts, in California; and for that reason, among others, Eastern lawyers have advised against investments in that State; for the public administrators are usually petty politicians in search of a job. The increasing burden of our State inheritance tax laws, whereby every State wherein a corporation exists besides the State of the deceased seizes its percentage of the stock of such corporation in the hands of the executors, is another step in this direction. This early Statute Merchant, liberal in other respects, still excludes Jews from its benefits.