A marked improvement has also been made in the distribution of estates generally. Among the slow nations of Europe the children generally wait for the unfortunate old people to die before taking their property. This tardy habit is now found to be often productive of great injury to children, especially to those who, snatched away by rapid manners before their begettors, are thus defrauded of their shares. “A bird in the hand” is no longer a _rara avis_, but a domestic fowl cultivated by rapid feeding. Gifts to the living avoid the taxes and discomforts of probate courts, in which it is disagreeable for a family, covered with crape, to sit and see a politician assess the estate upon the heirs. Fast progress has been made, also, in preventive justice. Injunctions, behind whose shields such old fogies as Lord Eldon, Lord Somers, Lord Thurlow, John Marshall, or William Story were accustomed to hide threatened rights until the danger was over-past, have recently been turned edgewise, and cut down corporations and others obnoxious Fisc-ally or otherwise, or else pressed against them so that they perspired away their adipose stock until they were comfortably ready for a receiver. The doctrine of divorce, which has puzzled the learned John Miltons in all the sleepy ages that have dozed before us, has been, in many States, simplified, so that he who runs through them may read a decree. Some people have uncharitably supposed that the premiums offered to individual disunions by such States as Illinois and Indiana, were devices to draw speculators thither for a day or so; but these are vagrant suspicions that ought not to be allowed on our trains. In feudal countries, where purity of blood is carefully guarded,—inasmuch as the descents to property are the rule and not descents from it as in America,—legists declare that a woman may not marry her cousin, her uncle, her grandfather, or even her father,—a wise enough restriction, perhaps, for such benighted folks, and where care in marrying often leaves the female part of the household to the dangerous company of these relations until far on in life. But with us women are not shut up to any such necessities, except in Utah, where they may, in the course of a respectably long life, marry through every genealogical degree without knowing it. In other parts they are as necessary as insurance companies, and so marry very soon; so that silver weddings are often seen at an early age, while golden matrimonies are more frequent than maternities or patrimonies. To every thoughtful man, who moves about our rapidly dissolving surfaces, where the railroad car is the kaleidoscope which turns up the bits of humanity in new combinations, a wife is necessary to put up a monument over him; for moving on is such a fixed law,—the only fixed thing in America, except debt and live corruption,—that while he was turning his majority, all his family relations would have gone to other States.