I, p. 6.] "to provide that his
children (several of whom were under age when he died) should qualify
themselves by industry and experience to enjoy the large patrimony
which he expected to bequeath to them, and with that in view he left a
will which was a voluminous compound of restraints and instructions.
He showed thereby how great were both his confidence in his own
judgment and his solicitude for the moral welfare of his descendants."
The courts upset the will. For the law in its objection to
perpetuities recognizes that there are distinct limits to the
usefulness of allowing anyone to impose his moral stencil upon an
unknown future. But the desire to impose it is a very human trait, so
human that the law permits it to operate for a limited time after
death.
The amending clause of any constitution is a good index of the
confidence the authors entertained about the reach of their opinions
in the succeeding generations. There are, I believe, American state
constitutions which are almost incapable of amendment. The men who
made them could have had but little sense of the flux of time: to them
the Here and Now was so brilliantly certain, the Hereafter so vague or
so terrifying, that they had the courage to say how life should run
after they were gone. And then because constitutions are difficult to
amend, zealous people with a taste for mortmain have loved to write on
this imperishable brass all kinds of rules and restrictions that,
given any decent humility about the future, ought to be no more
permanent than an ordinary statute.
Pages:
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151