The Footsteps at the Lock

I

It is an undeniable but a mystifying fact of natural ethics that a man has the right to dispose of his own property at death. They can do him no good now, those ancestral acres, those hard-won thousands, nor may any of the trees he planted, save the grim cypress, follow their ephemeral master; yet before the partnership of hand and mind is altogether dissolved, a brief flourish at the tail of a will may endow a pauper or disinherit a spendthrift, may be frittered away in the service of a hundred useless or eccentric ends. No good to him⁠—at least, there was once a theory that a man might be happier in the after state for the use of his means here, but we have abolished all that long since; no good to him, but much to expectant nephews and nieces, much to lifeboat funds and cats’ homes, much to the Exchequer, wilting for lack of death-duties. Of all this he is the arbiter. Yet we have it on the authority of all the copybooks that money does far more harm in the world than good; why, then, do we leave the direction of that harm to the one man who, ex hypothesi, will be out of the way when it happens? Why let the testator arrange for the unworthy squandering of his property, when he is to have no tenure in it henceforward except the inalienable grave?