Abolition of all personal servitudes. Freedom of testamentary disposition, re strained, however, by the provisions regu lating1 the legitimate or forced heirship, based on the reciprocal duties of parents and children to each other, established by the law of nature, and forbidding them to disinherit each other without cause. Freedom of contract to all persons л« juris, enforcing the sacredness of obliga tions by the just principle that all the prop erty of a debtor is the common pledge of his creditors. Simplification of titles to real estate by placing all on a purely allodial or free-hold basis. Prohibition of distinctions between legal and beneficial ownership. Prohibition of that form of trust estates known as substitutions, designed for the perpetuation of great estates by putting them out of commerce and transmitting them intact from one generation to another. Hostility to all restraints, legal or conven tional, upon the alienability of property, as contrary to public policy and to the liberty of the individual. . . . Its leading characteristic, and the one to which I would call special attention, is the pure spint of Democracy which informs and permeates its whole tenor. . . . It is the most purely Democratic system of law under which any people has ever lived. . . . The framers of our Louisiana Code made minor changes in the Napoleon Code, de signed to adapt it to new conditions, to fill up lacunae which had been discovered, and to settle controversies which had arisen, but as a whole, it is substantially a reproduction of the Napoleon Code. The most significant changes were two: First: The simplification of the com munity system by discarding distinctions be tween real and personal estate, and by con fining it to the community of acquêts and gains during marriage. The wisdom of this change is demon strated by experience, the result being that
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in Louisiana marriage contracts are rare, and growing rarer, while in France they are almost universal, and their most frequent object is to confine the community within the same limits which are prescribed by the Louisiana Code. Second: And by far the most important of all—the extension of the prohibition against substitution so as to embrace the prohibition of all fidei-commissa, the object and effect of which is to abolish and exclude from our law the whole complicated system of English trust estates, which has been the bulwark of class privileges, and the most prolific mother of untold evils. The three principles which are the jewels in the crown of the Civil Code of Louisiana, and which in their far-reaching effects rise above the plane of mere laws into the dignity of veritable institutions, are : the community system between spouses; the system of forced heirship; and the abolition of trust estates. I make bold to say that if our sister States had adopted these institutions when Louisiana did, our Republic would have been free, or at least comparatively free, from some of the greatest perils which to day menace its existence. IN an article on "The Rule Forbidding Suits against Receivers without Leave as -Applied to Receivers Managing Railroads and Like Corporations," in the current num ber of the American Law Review, W. A. Coutts says of receiverships: In some respects receiverships exemplify the worst type of socialism—the type, namely, in which the people have no voice in the government which owns and operates all industries and organizes and controls all labor. This is socialism minus democracy, or rather socialism plus absolutism. What sort of laws could be developed under such a regime? Inevitably they would be such laws as a master would prescribe for his servants. What rules will a court promulgate for the management of its employés, a court whose first duty it is to make the operation of the
