The hand-book of the law of legacies / containing a statement of the nature of legacies, and the accidents to which they are subjects; together with the rights of legatees, and the causes and manner of the ademption, cumulation, and abatement of their bequests

by Anonymous

INTRODUCTION.—LEGACIES AND LEGATEES.

When it is known that the gross sum upon which the several rates of legacy-duty are paid in this country amounts to more than £40,000,000 per annum, and that, during the last thirty years, more than £1,000,000,000 of money have been consigned from the hands of those who held it to those of their friends and successors, some notion will be obtained of the immense number of individuals who are intimately concerned in the subject of this little treatise. The solemn fact by which the laws respecting legacies are brought into operation, is of all things most calculated to dim the perception, and to blind the judgment. Nor is the heart less ready to mislead at such times than the intellect to fail; for in the distress arising from the loss of some dear friend or near relative, we are apt,—at least those are who are not callously selfish or morally debased—to think more of the bereavement we have sustained than of the interests and duties which the circumstance has called into action. Consciously unable to exercise our usual acuteness on such occasions, we submit to the guidance of some agent who has either been appointed by the deceased, or approved of by ourselves, for the distribution of his property; and we blindly rely upon his judgment and principles, when, perhaps, the one is not always sound, nor the other immaculate. The use of the faculties, with their usual business shrewdness, which duty and interest alike requires us to exhibit, too often looks like a cold-hearted forgetfulness of the kindness we have experienced, and the affection which we have enjoyed in the sense of newly acquired property, an advantage, which, to the man of right feeling, is, at that time of all others, the least desirable or valued. Or it may be that excessive grief so blunts the powers, that they are indeed incompetent to their usual task; and those whose interest it is our bounden duty to protect, even if we disregarded our own, may be injured through an incapacity to recollect what we know, or to make that useful which we recollect. In supplying the omissions of memory, or the want of right knowledge, we hope this little book will prove a useful as well as a sound and opportune guide.