ABSTRACT
In our courts we see every day that no cause is so bad that it fails to find a defender; consequently we are convinced that if we posed the following question to lawyers, judges, barristers or solicitors: Should inheritance by collateral line be abolished?, a few voices would be raised to maintain that nothing would be more unfair, dangerous or immoral; that the sacred bonds of the family would be broken; that it would be the abnegation of the science of Pothier, Domat and so on. We said a few jurists’ voices would be raised to defend inheritance by the collateral line; well, we were mistaken. It is not a few voices that we should say but nearly all voices, such is the strength of habit, prejudice and the ancient form on the minds of men who by their studies are always immersed in the past and by their writings in quibbles over the interpretation or execution of a dead text. These same men who in the morning in their black gowns and their bonnets in their hands are capable of speaking for hours about the need to preserve this sacred bond of families, in the evening will be entertained at the theatre by grasping nephews fighting over the spoils of an uncle whom they thought of only to calculate his age or to enquire into his infirmities. They will laugh at The Collateral2 and say ‘It’s the sad truth’; they will make jokes about the dénouements of comedies in which the inheritance from someone unknown so often helps dissipated idle young men to pay their debts and gives them the means to run up others. These same men, out of the courts and back into the world, glancing around them will see a host of divided families hostile to each other, as each is doing what can only be described as currying favour with a gouty, doddery old man; and in the morning, before the hearing when going through their cases, they will see that they are highly relevant to the debates whose origin is no different. We repeat however that the force of habit is so strong in these men of tradition that they will never be short of words when they want to show that the legislator was so right to declare that relatives to the twelfth degree inherit; if you insist, several of them will undertake to prove to you that the law should say the twelfth degree and not the eleventh or the thirteenth. Suppose for an instant that the minister presents a bill to the Chambers to reduce the figure twelve; we are convinced that this proposal is sure to find
antagonists, but we are also certain that these defenders, whoever they are, would have only good reasons to put forward; and happily good causes always win the day. What is the good side of this cause? Let us show you. First, what signs tell us whether a measure which concerns public wealth or the distribution of private fortunes is advantageous? The signs are as follows. When wealth, which is always either an instrument of work or a mainstay of idleness, comes into labouring hands, the measure which leads to this is good; it is bad if it sends the instrument of work into idle hands; lastly, this measure is blind if it leaves this distribution to chance. It is obvious that collateral inheritance distributes property without discernment, that is to say without any condition of work, and that the chance of birth rules over this distribution. Let us add that if it has this feature in common with direct line inheritance, it cannot however claim in its defence, particularly in the more distant degrees of kinship, the feelings of affection between the deceased and his successor to be found in the case of paternal inheritance. We may say as a general rule, without exception, that no man among those who have relatives only in the twelfth degree has set his fondest affections on this distant collateral; in these families where the prejudice of blood is most firmly rooted, it would be hard to find even a few examples of these nobiliary affections which are determined only by the name. With the constant progression of humanity, these prejudices of caste, race and blood have been considerably weakened. But it does not suffice to prove (easily enough, it must be said) that by collateral inheritance property is distributed fortuitously and that it can fall to the lot of the idle or to the workers. We must show how by abolishing this mode of succession it would be possible, without offending the prejudices which so easily arise in our present society against any measure which can cause fear of the arbitrary nature of power, to distribute the deceased’s property in a way which is profitable to the whole of society. We shall do this after examining another financial question which also requires a full answer.
