LAW OF TRUSTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. ORIGIN, HISTORY, DEFINITION, AND DIVISION OR CLASSIFICATION OF TRUSTS. § 1. The general nature of trusts. § 2. The technical nature of trusts, and their origin in the fidei commissa of the Roman law. § 3. The origin of uses. § 4. The inconveniences that arose from the prevalence of uses. § 5. The statute of uses. §§ 6, 7. The effect of the statute of uses, and the origin of trusts. §§ 8, 9, 10. Development of trusts in England and America. § 11. Advantage of the late adoption of trusts in America. § 12. Object of this treatise. §§ 13-17. Definition of trusts. § 18. Simple and special trusts. § 19. Ministerial and discretionary trusts. § 20. A mixed trust and power, and a power annexed to a trust. § 21. Legal and illegal trusts. § 22. Public and private trusts. § 23. Duration of a private trust and of a public trust. §§ 24-27. Express trusts, implied trusts, resulting trusts, and constructive trusts. § 1. In the earlier states of society the rules that govern the ownership, disposition, and use of property, are simple and of easy application. But as states increase, as property accumulates, and the business and relations of life become more complex, the rules of law which the new complications demand become themselves complicated, and sometimes difficult to understand and apply. The law, doctrine, and learn ing of trusts thus had a late origin and a slow and gradual development. The word "trust," in its popular and broadest sense, embraces a multitude of relations, duties, and responsibilities. Thus, executors and administrators, guardians of infants and lunatics, assignees in insolvency and bankruptcy, bailees, factors, agents, commission merchants, and common carriers, as well as the officers of public and private corporations, all exercise a kind of trust. Indeed, one definition of a trustee is "a person in whom some estate, interest, or power in or affecting property of any description is vested for the benefit of another." This definition embraces all the trusts and offices above named, but the law in relation to many, if not all of them, is or may be administered in the common-law courts. It is not of the law of such trusts that this treatise concerns itself. § 2. The trusts here treated are defined to be "an obligation upon a person arising out of a confidence reposed in him to apply property faithfully and according to such confidence."1 Another author says that " a trust is in the nature of a deposition by which a proprietor transfers to another the property of the subject intrusted, not that it should remain with him, but that it should be applied to certain uses for the behoof of a third party."2 Such trusts originated, and were first defined and reduced to practice under the jurisdiction of courts by the civil law. It was a rule of that law that a testator could not name a devisee to succeed the first devisee of property, but the first devisee took the absolute legal and beneficial ownership of the property; that is, a testator could not direct and control the use of his property after his death. This rule was modified so far that a testator might name an heir to succeed, if the first heir died too young to make a 1 Stair's Institutions of the Laws of Scotland, B. IV. tit. 6, § 2, p. 591; § 3, pp. 592-594. 2 Erskine's Institutes of the Laws of Scotland, B. III. p. 454. |