Among the Romans an hereditas, of which the heres was not yet ascertained, was said 'jacere;' and this is a case which corresponds to the abeyance of the English law. When the heres was ascertained, his rights as heres were considered to commence from the time of the death of the testator or the intestate. During the interval between the death and the ascertainment of the heres, the hereditas was sometimes spoken of as a person; and sometimes it was viewed as representing the defunct. These two modes of viewing the hereditas in this intermediate time express the same thing, the legal capacity of the defunct. The reason for this fiction was peculiar to the Roman law, and it had no other object than to facilitate certain acquisitions of property by means of slaves who were a part of the hereditas. A slave could in many cases acquire for his master; but in the case of an hereditas jacens, the slave could only acquire for the benefit of the hereditas by virtue of a fiction that he had still an owner of proper legal capacity. The fiction accordingly made the acquisition of the slave valid by reference to the legal capacity of his defunct owner, which was known, and not to the condition of the unascertained heres, who might not have the necessary legal capacity. Thus, if a Roman, who had a legal capacity to make a will, died intestate, and one of the intestate's slaves was appointed his heres by another person, the slave could take as heres for the benefit of the hereditas to which he belonged, by virtue of the fiction which gave to this hereditas the legal capacity of the defunct intestate. (Savigny, System des heutigen Römischen Rechts, ii. 363.) ABILITY; CAPACITY, LEGAL. [AGE; WIFE.] ABJURATION (of the Realm) signifies a sworn banishment, or the taking of an oath to renounce and depart from the realm for ever. By the ancient common law of England, if a person guilty of any felony, excepting sacrilege, fled to a parish church or churchyard for sanctuary, he might, within forty days afterwards, go clothed in sackcloth before the coroner, confess the full particulars of his guilt, and take an oath to abjure the king dom for ever, and not to return without the king's licence. Upon making his confession and taking this oath, he became attainted of the felony; he had forty days from the day of his appearance before the coroner to prepare for his departure, and the coroner assigned him such port as he chose for his embarkation, to which he was bound to repair immediately with a cross in his hand, and to embark with all convenient speed. If he did not go immediately out of the kingdom, or if he afterwards returned into England without licence, he was condemned to be hanged, unless he happened to be a clerk, in which case he was allowed the benefit of clergy. This practice, which has obvious marks of a religious origin, was, by several regulations in the reign of Henry VIII., in a great measure discontinued. and at length by the statute 21 James I. c. 28, all privilege of sanctuary and abjuration consequent upon it were entirely abolished. In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, however, amongst other severities then enacted against Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters convicted of having refused to attend the divine service of the Church of England, they were by statute (35 Eliz. c. 1) required to abjure the realm in open court, and if they refused to swear, or returned to England without licence after their departure, they were to be adjudged felons, and to suffer death without benefit of clergy. Thus the punishment of abjuration inflicted by this Act of Parliament was far more severe than abjuration for felony at the common law: in the latter case, the felon had the benefit of clergy; in the former, it was expressly taken away. Protestant Dissenters are expressly exempted from this severe enactment by the Toleration Act; but Popish recusants convict were liable to be called upon to abjure the realm for their recusancy, until a statute, passed in the 31 Geo. III. (1791), relieved them from that and many other penal restrictions upon their taking the oaths of allegiance and abjuration. ABJURATION (Oath of). This is an oath asserting the title of the present royal family to the crown of England. It is imposed by 13 Will. III. c. 6; 1 Geo. I. c. 13; and 6 Geo. III. c. 53. By this ingham, having embraced the Roman Catholic religion, took and subscribed the oath required to be taken and subscribed by Roman Catholics." The word Abjuratio does not occur in oath the juror recognises the right of the | king under the Act of Settlement, engages to support him to the utmost of the juror's power, promises to disclose all traitorous conspiracies against him, and expressly disclaims any right to the crown of Eng-classical Latin writers, and the verb Abland by the descendants of the Pretender. jurare, which often occurs, signifies to The juror next declares that he rejects deny a thing falsely upon oath. the opinion that princes excommunicated by the Pope may be deposed or murdered; that he does not believe that the Pope of Rome or any other foreign prince, prelate, or person has or ought to have jurisdiction directly or indirectly within the realm. The form of oath taken by Roman Catholics who sit in either House of Parliament is given in 10 Geo. IV. c. 7 (the Roman Catholic Relief Act). The first part of the oath is similar in substance to the form required under 6 Geo. III. c. 53. The following part of the oath is new:-"I do hereby disclaim, disavow, and solemnly abjure any intention to subvert the present Church Establishment as settled by law within this realm; and I do solemnly swear that I will never exercise any privilege to which I am or may become entitled to disturb or weaken the Protestant religion or Protestant government in the United Kingdom; and I do solemnly, in the presence of God, profess, testify and declare that I do make this declaration, and every part thereof, in the plain and ordinary sense of the words of this oath, without any evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation whatsoever." Before the passing of this Act (10 Geo. IV. c. 7), the oath and declaration required to be taken and made as qualification for sitting and voting in Parliament were the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration, and the declarations commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, and the sacrifice of the mass. The case of a member of the House of Commons becoming converted to the Roman Catholic faith after he had taken his seat, occurred for the first time since the passing of 10 Geo. IV. c. 7, in the session of 1844, and is thus noticed in the Votes and Proceedings of the House, dated May 13:"Charles Robert Scott Murray, esquire, member for the county of Buck ABORIGINES, a term by which we denote the primitive inhabitants of a country. Thus, to take one of the most striking instances, when the continent and islands of America were discovered, they were found to be inhabited by various races of people, of whose immigration into those regions we have no historical accounts. All the tribes, then, of North America may, for the present, be considered as aborigines. We can, indeed, since the discovery of America, trace the movements of various tribes from one part of the continent to another; and, in this point of view, when we compare the tribes one with another, we cannot call a tribe which has changed its place of abode, aboriginal, with reference to the new country which it has occupied. The North American tribes that have moved from the east side of the Mississippi to the west of that river are not aborigines in their new territories. But the whole mass of American Indians must, for the present, be considered as aboriginal with respect to the rest of the world. The English, French, Germans, and others, who have settled in America, are, of course, not aborigines with reference to that continent, but settlers, or colonists. If there is no reason to suppose that we can discover traces of any people who inhabited England prior to and different from those whom Julius Cæsar found here, then the Britons of Cæsar's time are the aborigines of this island. The term aborigines first occurs in the Greek and Roman writers who treated of the earlier periods of Roman history, and, though interpreted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (who writes it, in common with other Greek authors, 'Aßwpryîves, or 'Aẞopryives, or 'Aßwpiyivoi) to mean ancestors, it is more probable that it corresponds to the Greek word autochthones. This latter designation, indeed, expresses the most remote possible origin of a nation, for it signifies "people coeval with the land which they inhabit." The word aborigines, though perhaps not derived, as some suppose, from the Latin words ab and origo, still has the appearance of being a general term analogous to autochthones, and not the name of any people really known to history. The Aborigines of the ancient legends, interwoven with the history of Rome, were, according to Cato, the inhabitants of part of the country south of the Tiber, called by the Romans Latium, and now the Maremma of the Campagna di Roma. (Niebuhr, Roman History.) The word aborigines has of late come into general use to express the natives of various parts of the world in which Europeans have settled; but it seems to be limited or to be nearly limited to such natives as are barbarous, and do not cultivate the ground, and have no settled habitations. Some of the later Roman writers, as Sallust, describe the Italian aborigines as a race of savages, not living in a regular society; a description which, as Niebuhr remarks, is probably nothing else than an ancient speculation about the progress of mankind from animal rudeness to civilization. Such a speculation was very much to Sallust's taste, and we find it also in Lucretius and Horace. Probably the modern sense of this word and the sense in which Sallust uses it agree more nearly than appears at first. The aborigines of Australasia and Van Diemen's Land (if there are any left in Van Diemen's Land) are so called as being savages, though the name may be applied with equal propriety to cultivators of the ground. Some benevolent people suppose that aborigines, who are not cultivators of the ground, may become civilized like Europeans. But it has not yet been proved satisfactorily that this change can be effected in any large numbers; and if it can be effected, it is an essential condition that the aborigines must give up their present mode of life and adopt that of the settlers. But such a change is not easy: even in the United States of North America it has been only partially effected. The wide expanse of country between the Mississippi and the Atlantic is now nearly cleared of the aborigines, and the white man, who covets the possession of land, will follow up his victory till he has occupied every portion of the continent which he finds suitable for cultivation. The red man must become a cultivator, or he must retire to places where the white man does not think it worth his while to follow him. The savage aborigines do not pass from what we call barbarism to what we call civilization without being subjected to the force of external circumstances, that is, the presence among them of settlers or conquerors. There is no more reason for supposing that huntsmen will change their mode of life, such as it is, without being compelled, than that agricultural people will change theirs. Aborigines, then, as we now understand them, will remain what they are until they are affected by foreign intercourse; and this intercourse will either destroy them in the end, a result which is confirmed by most of our experience, or it will change their habits to those of their conquerors or the settlers among them, and so preserve them, not as a distinct nation, for that is impossible, but by incorporating them among the foreigners. A nation of agriculturists, though conquered, may and does endure, and may preserve its distinctive character; a nation of savages can only endure as such by keeping free from all intercourse with an agricultural and commercial people. ABORTION. [HOMICIDE.] ABROGATION. [LAW.] ABSENTEE. This is a term applied, generally by way of reproach, to that class of capitalists who derive their income from one country, and reside in another country, in which they expend their income. We here propose to state some of the more material points in the controverted question, whether the consumption of absentees is an evil to the particular country from which they derive their revenues. There is a decided tendency in the progress of social intercourse to loosen the ties which formerly bound an individual or a family to one particular spot. From the improvement of roads, and the rapidity and certainty of steam navigation, Dublin is now as near, in point of time, to London, as Bath was half a century ago; and the distance between England and every part of the Continent is in the same way daily diminishing. The inducements to absenteeism, whether from Ireland to England, or from England to the Continent, are constantly increasing; and it is worth while considering whether the evils of absenteeism are so great as some suppose, or whether, according to a theory that was much in vogue some years ago, absenteeism is an evil at all. The expenditure of a landed proprietor resident upon his estate calls into action the industry of a number of labourers, domestics, artisans, and tradesmen. If the landlord remove to another part of the same country, the labourers remain; the domestic servants probably remove with him; but the artisans and tradesmen whom he formerly employed lose that profit which they once derived by the exchange of their skill or commodities for a portion of the landlord's capital. It never occurs to those who observe and perhaps deplore these changes, that the landlord ought to be prevented from spending his money in what part of his own country he pleases. They conclude that there is only a fresh distribution of the landlord's revenues, and that new tradesmen and mechanics have obtained the custom which the old ones have lost. But if the same landlord go to reside in a foreign country-if the Englishman go to France or Italy, or the Irishman to England-it is sometimes asserted that the amount of revenue which he spends in the foreign country is so much clear loss to the country from which he derives his property, and so much encouragement withdrawn from its industry; and that he ought, therefore, to be compelled to stay at home, instead of draining his native land for the support of foreign rivals. Some economists maintain that this is a popular delusion, and that, in point of fact, the revenue spent by the landlord in a foreign country has precisely the same effect upon the industry of his own country as if his consumption took place at home, for that, in either case, it is unproductive consumption. We will endeavour to state their arguments as briefly as we can. We will suppose a landowner to derive an income of 1000l. a year from an estate in one of our agricultural counties. We leave out of the consideration whether he resides or not upon his estate, and endeavours, by his moral influence, to improve the condition of his poorer neighbours, or lets his land to a tenant. The landowner may reside in London, or Brighton, or Cheltenham. With his rents he probably purchases many articles of foreign production, which have been exchanged for the productions of our own country. There are few people now who do not understand that if we did not take from foreigners the goods which they can produce cheaper and better than we can, we should not send to foreigners the goods which we can produce cheaper and better than they can. If we did not take wines from the continental nations, for instance, we should not send to the continental nations our cottons and hardware; and the same principle applies to all the countries of the earth with which we have commercial intercourse. The landlord, therefore, by consuming the foreign wines encourages our own manufactures of cotton and hardware, as much as if, drinking no foreign wine at all, he applied the money so saved to the direct purchases of cotton and hardware at home. But he even bestows a greater encouragement upon native industry, by consuming wine which has been exchanged for cotton and hardware, than if he abstained from drinking the wine; for he uses as much cotton and hardware as he wants, as well as the wine; and by using the wine he enables other people in Europe to use the cotton and hardware, who would otherwise have gone without it. For all that he consumes of foreign produce, some English produce has been sent in exchange. Whatever may be the difference between the government accounts of exports and imports (than which nothing can be more fallacious), there is a real balance between the goods we send away and the goods we receive; and thus the intrinsic value of all foreign trade is this,-that it opens a larger store of commodities to the consumers, whilst it develops a wider field of industry for the producers. There used to be a notion, which for many years affected our legislation, that unless we sent away to foreigners a great many more goods than we received from them, or, in other words, unless our exports were much greater in value than our imports, the balance of trade was against us. [BALANCE OF TRADE.] This notion was founded upon the belief that if we sent away a greater amount of goods than those we received in exchange, we should be paid the difference in bullion; and that the nation would be rich, not in the proportion in which it was industrious at home, and in which its industry obtained foreign products in exchange for native products, but as it got a surplus of gold, year by year, through its foreign trade. Now, in point of fact, no such surplus ever did accrue, or ever could have accrued; for the commercial transactions between one country and another are in fact a series of exchanges or barter, and gold is only the standard by which those exchanges are regulated. We shall see how these considerations bear upon the relations of the English landlord to his native country when he becomes an absentee. When the landlord, whose case we have supposed, resided upon his estate, he probably received his rental direct | from his tenants. That rental was the landlord's share of as many quarters of corn, as many head of oxen and sheep, as many fleeces of wool, as many fowls, as many pounds of butter, and so forth, as the estate produced. Three or four centuries ago the landlord's share was paid in kind: for the convenience of all parties it is now paid in money, or, in other words, the tenant sells the landlord's share, as well as his own share, and pays over the amount of his share to the landlord, in a money-rent, instead of in produce. When the landlord removes to a distant part of the country, this arrangement of modern times becomes doubly convenient. The rental is collected by a steward, and is remitted, usually through a banker, to the landlord. By this process, the produce of the land may be most advantageously sold; and the landlord receives the amount of his share at his own door, without even the risk of sending money from one part of the kingdom to another. If the landlord becomes an absentee, the process of remitting his rental assumes a more complicated shape. We will suppose that he settles in the Netherlands. His means of living there depend upon the punctual transmission of the value of his share of the corn, cattle, and other produce which grow upon his estate in England. To make the remittance in bullion would not only be expensive, but unsafe; and, indeed, remittances in bullion can never be made to any considerable extent (such as the demands of absentees would require) from one country to another; for these large remittances would produce a scarcity of money at home, and then the bullion being raised in value, its remittance would consequently cease. Although the expenses of our armies in the Peninsula, in 1812-13, amounted to nearly 32,000,000l., the remittances in coin were little more than 3,000,000l. Nearly all foreign remittances are carried on by bills of exchange. The operation of a bill of exchange, in connection with the absentee landlord, would be this:-He is a consumer now, in great part, of foreign produce; he may require many articles of English produce, through the effect of habit; but whether or no, there must be an export of English goods to some country, to the amount of the foreign goods which he consumes, otherwise his remittances could not be made to him. He draws a bill upon England, which he pays, through a banker, to a merchant at Antwerp. This bill represents his share of the corn and cattle upon his farm; but the merchant at Antwerp, who does not want corn and cattle, transmits it to a merchant at London, in payment for cotton goods and hardware, which he does want. Or there may be another process. The agent, in England, of the absentee landlord, may procure a bill upon the merchant at Antwerp, which he transmits to the English landlord; and the merchant at Antwerp, recognising in that bill the representation of a debt which he has incurred to England, hands over the proceeds to the bearer of the bill. In either case the bill represents the value |