Excerpt from Commercial Mortmain: A Study of the Trust Problem I have endeavored to set forth in the following pages in a didactic form, a fair statement of both sides of the question of trusts and I place in juxtaposition in the introductory chapter, the his tory of the English Statutes of mortmain, which undertook to prevent the accumulation of lands by corporations, to show the impossibility of checking the trend of national development by penal legis lation. Mortmain means dead-hand - the locking up of real estate by corporations - because corporations having perpetual life it was assumed that once being possessed of lands they would continue to hold them indefinitely, and thus withdraw them from the open market. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.