It will perhaps be felt that I speak too speculatively and under- rate the so called " natural right" to inherit. Against other individuals the child (or near relative) certainly has a paramount title, because the deceased would have wished the property to go to him, and other things being equal the wishes of the former owner should prevail, as we have seen. But the contest is not between the child and another person; it is between the child and the State, and the owner's wishes have never been allowed to override the dictates of public policy. The feudal law utterly dis- regarded them in order to concentrate-property and preserve family power; the State of to-day may rightly disregard them to secure the distribution of wealth. For the most important aspect of great fortunes is not the luxury which they engender, nor yet the envy and discontent which they excite; it is the tremendous power which they give over men, and - it seems - over nations. We may well hesitate about depriving a man of what he himself has fought for and won by his ability or his luck. But to make his conquest hereditary, to put this enormous influence into the hands of a man who may be entirely unfitted for it, violates every principle of law and policy for which the government stands.
[Since this article was in proof the opinion has been handed down by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the Collateral Inheritance Tax Cases. It is believed that nothing there decided affects any of the positions which have been assumed in the foregoing discussion. But the learned Chief Justice appears to go out of his way to express his opinion that there is a right of in-heritance or of handing down by descent- he is quite uncertain which -so protected by the Constitution that the State cannot destroy it by taxation. To be sure Chief Justice Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland said (4 Wheaton, 427, 428), that the power to tax implied the power to destroy. But that case has been somewhat shaken, and there is authority for the proposition that a State cannot do indirectly what it cannot directly. The learned Chief Justice of Massachusetts must however assume a common-law right of some sort, either to transmit or to inherit property on the death of the owner. With great deference I feel confident that such a position is untenable without abandoning many statutes never heretofore questioned on constitutional grounds. Moreover, the common law of estates pur autre vie seems conclusively to show that, as to land at least, there was no common-law light in the relatives of a dead man to succeed to his property. For on a grant to A for the life of B, if A die leaving B, the land did not descend to A's relatives but went as bonum vacans to the occupant. 2 Bacon's Abr. 561; Co. Litt. Lib. I, sec. 56.]
