me as a means of avoiding the terrible and disastrous confusion which
it will be next to impossible to avoid after a term of years, if the
fee should be conveyed, when the purchasers die and sell or change
land as they will to a certain extent in time. It is bad enough to
trace a title and find out whether it is good for anything here in
systematic New England, and difficult enough, too, to fix boundaries
and maintain them against encroachments; but it makes my orderly bones
ache to think of a time when, after some men now purchasing land shall
die, leaving two or three sets of children, some born under wedlock
and some not, some not their own but their wives' children, some even
of questionable parentage, and some who were never heard of before,
all claiming a slice of the deceased man's land, and of course all
claiming the best. Suppose it was bounded by a "stake and stones" as
of old here, minus the stones which are absent; suppose some of the
claimants think best to set up a new stake where one has gone to
decay, and suppose they are not over exact in placing it; or suppose,
as is more than likely, their neighbor thinks the new stake encroaches
on him and pulls it up entirely, stamping on the hole and putting it
in according to his own ideas, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Now, as you
must admit that all this is likely to occur, and worse too, would such
a state of things tend to bring about a healthy and rapid development?
Any one who has watched the minute subdivision of lands among the
French peasantry knows that after a few generations a man has not land
enough to live on or work economically, and hence a vast amount of
time and energy is wasted in France for lack of organization;--that,
too, where they have an administration of justice the most minute and
exact to be found in the whole world, an organization of the judiciary
which reaches to every man's case, however minute or inconspicuous.
The life-lease system would avoid these troubles, but would be open
to this objection, a serious one, too, viz., the negro ought to feel
that in building up a home for himself, it shall be a home for his
children, for he has too little of the feeling of responsibility for
his offspring, which is one of the best stimulants to good order and
civilization.

The future value of the lands is a question I don't think of much
consequence, neither is the question of profit to the present holders
to be considered, when conflicting with