6 
Property and Inheritance. 
would quickly commit to the management of the 
State would hardly be administered efficiently. 
A third objection lies in the economic effect of 
tying up in trustee securities all accumulations of 
capital except those made by men still living. True, 
it would hamper the dissipation of them, but equally 
it would hamper the productive use of them. Economj- 
cally one of the most important services that capital 
renders is the opportunity it gives to its owner to 
experiment, to take risks, to undertake enterprises 
that will not bear fruit for a long time. The human 
interest that an owner takes in his property, where 
his property is not yet reduced to an abstract right 
to money payments, is also a loss to be deplored ; 
the upkeep of agricultural land, the care of house 
property, the intensive supervision of machinery 
by people of a mechanical turn of mind, the attach- 
ment to a family business, are sources of wealth that 
a departmentalised Public Trustee could hardly 
supply. 
If, however, as is probable, the heir to property 
sought to recover the full control of the capital value 
of his inheritance by assigning his income rights as 
security for a loan, the advantages of vesting the 
legal ownership of the estate in the Public Trustee 
would be lost. Such assigning might be prohibited 
but the effect of such prohibition would probably be, 
not to prevent the practice, but only to complicate 
it, just as the attempt to prohibit sales of land and 
the creation of subsidiary and contingent interests 
in land only succeeded in making English Land Law 
the most complicated branch of all the complicated 
mystery of law. Lawyers would find ways of getting 
round the separation of the legal from the equitable 
ownership of estates, and inherited property of all 
kinds would presently acquire the characteristics 
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