246 HARVARD LAW REVIEW. I. It is true that there is no precedent which the Court of New Hampshire has to regard as binding that compels it to follow the rulings elsewhere ; but I submit it is a serious thing deliberately to break away from the consensus of the English speaking world on this subject. True, the matter is not one of commercial intercourse, and therefore it is not so important that the law should be uniform upon it ; but persons often own land in States other than their own, audit is no slight evil that the laws governing the settlement and devolution of property should differ. Again, I am no blind admirer of the Rule against Perpetuities, but it is a doctrine of purely judicial origin, and it has grown to fit the ordinary dealings of the community. It is, too, a well estab- lished, simple, and clear rule. There are indeed some few cases where the law is still unsettled, but they are largely on matters which will never come up in this country, such as the creation of long terms attendant upon estates tail. The process of adjudica- tion has been a process of clearing and simplification, and the tendency of legislation, so far as it has touched the matter at all, has been to make the rule more stringent. It is a dangerous thing to make such a radical change in a part of the law which is concatenated with almost mathematical pre- cision. A striking instance is shown by the fate of New York. Before the year 1828, the forty or fifty volumes of the New York Reports disclose but one case involving a question of remoteness. In that year the reviewers (clever men they were, too) undertook to remodel the Rule against Perpetuities, and what a mess they made of it ! At my last count 249 cases have come before the New York courts under the statute as to remoteness, — an impressive warn- ing on the danger of meddling with the subject. II. The doctrine of the New Hampshire Court in this case involves a fallacy. It speaks of a primary intent to give to persons and a secondary intent to give to them at a particular time, and it pur- ports to preserve the primary intent while discarding the secondary intent by substituting another time. This assumes that the per- sons remain the same, and only the time is changed. But that is precisely what does not occur ; with the time, the persons are changed. Take the present case. The testator meant to give to
