slowly and irregularly did the states
drift toward universal suffrage; but although the impediments in the way
of voting were more serious than they seem to us in these days when the
community is more prosperous and money less scarce, they were still not
very great, and in the opinion of conservative people they barely
sufficed to exclude from the suffrage such shiftless persons as had no
visible interest in keeping down the taxes.

[Sidenote: Abolition of primogeniture, entails, and manorial
privileges.]

At the time of the Revolution the succession to property was regulated
in New York and the southern states by the English rule of
primogeniture. The eldest son took all. In New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
Delaware, and the four New England states, the eldest son took a double
share. It was Georgia that led the way in decreeing the equal
distribution of intestate property, both real and personal; and between
1784 and 1796 the example was followed by all the other states. At the
same time entails were either definitely abolished, or the obstacles to
cutting them off were removed. In New York the manorial privileges of
the great patroons were swept away. In Maryland the old manorial system
had long been dying a natural death through the encroachments of the
patriarchal system of slavery. The ownership of all ungranted lands
within the limits of the thirteen states passed from the crown not to
the Confederacy, but to the several state governments. In Pennsylvania
and Maryland such ungranted lands had belonged to the lords proprietary.
They were now forfeited to the state. The Penn family was indemnified by
Pennsylvania to the amount of half a million dollars; but Maryland made
no compensation to the Calverts, inasmuch as their claim was presented
by an illegitimate descendant of the last Lord Baltimore.

[Sidenote: Steps toward the abolition of slavery and the slave-trade.]

The success of the American Revolution made it possible for the
different states to take measures for the gradual abolition of slavery
and the immediate abolition of the foreign slave-trade. On this great
question the state of public opinion in America was more advanced than
in England. So great a thinker as Edmund Burke, who devoted much
thought to the subject, came to the conclusion that slavery was an
incurable evil, and that there was not the slightest hope that the trade
in slaves could be stopped. The most that he thought could be done by
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