At the time of the Revolution the succession to property was regulated in New York and the southern states by the English rule of primogeniture. The eldest son took all. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and the four New England states, the eldest son took a double share. It was Georgia that led the way in decreeing the equal distribution of intestate property, both real and personal; and between 1784 and 1796 the example was followed by all the other states. At the same time entails were either definitely abolished, or the obstacles to cutting them off were removed. In New York the manorial privileges of the great patroons were swept away. In Maryland the old manorial system had long been dying a natural death through the encroachments of the patriarchal system of slavery. The ownership of all ungranted lands within the limits of the thirteen states passed from the crown not to the Confederacy, but to the several state governments. In Pennsylvania and Maryland such ungranted lands had belonged to the lords proprietary. They were now forfeited to the state. The Penn family was indemnified by Pennsylvania to the amount of half a million dollars; but Maryland made no compensation to the Calverts, inasmuch as their claim was presented by an illegitimate descendant of the last Lord Baltimore. [Sidenote: Steps toward the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade.] The success of the American Revolution made it possible for the different states to take measures for the gradual abolition of slavery and the immediate abolition of the foreign slave-trade. On this great question the state of public opinion in America was more advanced than in England. So great a thinker as Edmund Burke, who devoted much thought to the subject, came to the conclusion that slavery was an incurable evil, and that there was not the slightest hope that the trade in slaves could be stopped. The most that he thought could be done by judicious legislation was to mitigate the horrors which the poor negroes endured on board ship, or to prevent wives from being sold away from their husbands or children from their parents. Such was the outlook to one of the greatest political philosophers of modern times just eighty-two years before the immortal proclamation of President Lincoln! But how vast was the distance between Burke and Bossuet, who had declared about eighty years earlier that "to condemn slavery was to condemn the Holy Ghost!" It was equally vast between Burke and his contemporary Thurlow, who in 1799 poured out the vials of his wrath upon "the altogether miserable and contemptible" proposal to abolish the slave-trade. George III. agreed with his chancellor, and resisted the movement for abolition with all the obstinacy of which his hard and narrow nature was capable. In 1769 the Virginia legislature had enacted that the further importation of negroes, to be sold into slavery, should be prohibited. But George III. commanded the governor to veto this act,