Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 9.djvu/603

588 FEDERAL REPORTER. �729,) and in such cases "the whole estate is vested in the trustees in law and in equity, subject only to the execution of the trust. The person for whose benefit the trust is created takes no estate or inter- est in the property." 1 Eev. St. 729, § 60. No interest in this prop- erty which Mr. Duncan had at his death ever passed to bis children. The whole legal title and the possession were in the trustees long befor& the grantor's death, and so continued for two years aftervvards, without change, until the death of his wife, when the legal title to the property and the possession passed direct from the trustees to the children. What the children thus took was not anything which Stephen Duncan or any other person had "died possessed of," but what the trustees had had in their own possession along with the legal title long before. It appears, therefore, that the children did not take this property from any person "dying possessed of it," and therefore section 124 of the act of 1864 does not embrace this case. As to beneficiai interests accruing, not "by will or intestate laws," but by deed "intended to take effect after the death of the grantor," the act can only apply to cases where, under such deeds, the ancestor or other relative of the beneficiaries mentioned in the five subdivisions of section 124 was entitled to hold possession till his death, and "died possessed" tliereof . This is not such a case. �The language of section 125 confirais the same view. It provides that the tax or duty aforesaid shall be a lien or charge upon "the property of every person who may die as aforesaid, " etc. The words "every person who may die as aforesaid" can only refer to the words which are repeated substantially in each of the five subdivisions of section 124, viz., "the person who died possessed of such property," and the lien is given upon the property of such person only; and there is none such in this case. The act, I think, plainly contem- plates those cases only, whether arising under will, intestacy, or trust deeds, in which the grantor, the testator, or deceased relative had the legal possession or ownership of the property up to his death, and not cases like this, where, in consequence of a valid trust created before the passage of the act, the grantor or ancestor had, according to the law of his domicile, no legal or equitable estate in the prop- erty at the time of his death, and where the property was subse- quently distributed among his children through the medium of a long prior trust. The complaint should, therefore, be dismissed. ��� �