aggregating lands and tying them up, so that no living person shall be full owner, but a mere tenant for some unborn child. No family settlements with “tenants in common in tail,” with “cross-remainders in tail,” till some tenant-in-tail reaches the age of twenty-one years, when he may be able with the consent of his father, who is tenant for life, to bar the entail with all the remainders. There is no belief, in Switzerland, that land was made to minister to the perpetual elevation of a privileged class; but a wide-spread and positive sentiment, as Turgot puts it, that “the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead;” nor, it may be added, to the unborn. The natural forces of accumulation and dispersion are not hampered by ninety-nine years building leases, perpetual and irredeemable rent, or heavy expense of conveyance; but are in every way encouraged, simplified, and facilitated by the laws federal and cantonal. The wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries exercised, indirectly, considerable influence on Swiss land tenure, by breaking up the large properties--monastic, conventual, and private--which had for some time been steadily augmented; and produced a reaction in favor of gradual redistribution. This wider dissemination of land among the people was carried on without rudely shocking or violating proprietary rights, as far as the few recalcitrant owners permitted it to be done; certainly with not a tithe of the legislative injustice or coercion, with which a greater part of these accumulations had been made. It is from this period that the existing system of land tenure in Switzerland may be said really to date. The feudal rights asserted by certain Cantons over others, which took the form of landed charges, were all swept away at the time of the setting up of the Helvetian Republic, in 1798. Since the commencement of this century, and especially since the constitutions of 1830 were framed, the land throughout the whole of Switzerland has been completely emancipated,--the system of peasant proprietorship working side by side with that of small tenant farmers. The survival of the Commune, intact with its various property rights in fee-simple and usufruct, does not conflict with or impede the general tendency to discourage the centralization of landed property in the hands of the few. For it has come to be axiomatic with the Swiss that the effort to acquire land is the mainspring of the life of the peasant, the root of his industry, of his painstaking, frugal, and saving life. The solid, sterling elements of the Swiss peasant’s character are traced by all the native writers to their source in the educative power of property,--property in land.