as the conclusive question.
I conceive the balance has to be struck mainly between these two
things; on the one hand, the duty of persons connected with the
proprietorship of considerable estates in land, to assume freely
the burden and responsibility of serving in parliament. On the
other hand, the peculiar position of this combined estate, which in
the first place is of a nature to demand from the proprietor an
unusual degree of care and supervision, and which in the second
place has been hit severely by recent depressions in corn and coal,
which may be termed its two pillars.

On the first point it may fairly be taken into view that in serving
for twenty years you have stood four contested elections, a number
I think decidedly beyond the average.... I will assume, for the
present, that the election has passed without bringing you back to
parliament. I should then consider that you had thus relieved
yourself, at any rate for a period, from a serious call upon your
time and mind, mainly with a view to the estate; and on this
account, and because I have constituted you its legal master, I
write this letter in order to place clearly before you some of the
circumstances which invest your relation to it with a rather
peculiar character.

I premise a few words of a general nature. An enemy to entails,
principally though not exclusively on social and domestic grounds,
I nevertheless regard it as a very high duty to labour for the
conservation of estates, and the permanence of the families in
possession of them, as a principal source of our social strength,
and as a large part of true conservatism, from the time when
Aeschylus wrote

[Greek: archaioplouton despoton polle charis].[206]

But if their possession is to be prolonged by conduct, not by
factitious arrangements, we must recognise this consequence, that
conduct becomes subject to fresh demands and liabilities.

In condemning laws which tie up the _corpus_, I say nothing
against powers of charge, either by marriage settlement or
otherwise, for wife and children, although questions of degree and
circumstance may always have to be considered. But to mortgages I
am greatly opposed. Whether they ought or ought not to be
restrained by law, I do not now inquire. But I am confident