The universal degradation, poverty and misery, caused by these aristocratic scourges of society, destitute as they are of a single redeeming advantage to lessen the enormity of the evil, sufficiently betray the nefarious views and selfish ends of the feudal legislators by whom they were enacted. But these are best shown in the mischievous effects which it is impossible for them not to produce, forming, as they do, a source which diffuses fraternal jealousy, animosity, and hatred, through a thousand channels over the land: and all to perpetuate the insolent pride of family distinction, by arming an arrogant individual with unjust power to lord it over the rest of the family, and that too by means of the same wealth which ought to render the whole independent. In these cases, when the younger brothers escape penury or beggary, it is only by dint of doubling the injustice of these laws, by quartering them, as so many locusts, upon the industry of the public, under shelter of that mass of aristocratic corruption, whence issue our stall-fed hierarchy, and the thousands of other privileged idlers, whose places are created for the adherents and supporters of profligate governments. Thus the younger sons and brothers are provided for whilst the poor females, if not palmed upon the pension list, are hopelessly consigned to the most abject dependence; their only inheritance being a perverted education, by which they are moulded into mere creatures of unnatural habits and customs, and of mental impressions that are utterly false in everything. These laws, thus infamously contrived for the exclusive benefit and aggrandisement of the makers, in perpetuating the feudal line of succession by entails upon immense tracts of land, again double the evil in a national point of view, by preventing the creation of that wealth, which never fails to arise from the proper division and subdivision of over-grown estates, the parcelling out of which is sure to be followed by a superior cultivation of the land. It is impossible to suppose that the people generally, of any country, were ever so grossly and stupidly ignorant, as to have a hand in forming such iniquitous institutions, _and those who tolerate them are not worthy of better_.* * Napoleon observed that, "The people of a nation were not deserving of better laws than those they submitted to." "Nature's social union;" or that universal harmony which is chiefly disturbed by the wanton, unfeeling dominion of man, and thus fallaciously sanctioned by the "science of God." These are samples of the grievances which may be expected to spring up, when aristocracies usurp and engross the legislation of countries; and when the contaminating arts of theology are allied to these, it is then that political evils of the first magnitude are engendered.