AN EXTRAORDINARY WILL.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2472, 4 March 1893, Page 3

AN EXTRAORDINARY WILL.

The Supreme Court hi Victoria has been called upon to read a very extraordinary will. The maker of at was a sheep farmer named Alfred Arden. He made certain specific bequests, such as £2 2s a week to hia wife for life and so forth; and added that in the event of his legitimate posterity failing in the requirements indicated as necessary to entitle them to inherit, “which I pray heaven to avert, as earnestly as I depreciate their unregulated increase,” then “ the real and personal estates herein devised, with their increases and improvements, shall go to the use of the duly educated aborigines, then surviving, if any, whose forefathers it can reasonably be shown claimed this land by tribal law. lo show the involved nature of the language of the will the following may be quoted as a specimen :—“ Regarding things m these promises done being punishable, civilly or criminally, the doers, often Kcapegoats maybe for others, shall not be so dealt with as to obscure the healing and correcting object of all law enacted and enforced in God’s holy and redeeming name and on oath of His Word which should be the standard of of all testamentary provisions coming into bus courts, ignoring which transgressors are made worse instead of better.’’ The closing words were : “ This will of mine provides against these extremes of poverty and riches, and proposes that treasure and security from necessity, care, and distraction, which experience shall best promote for God’s honour and for public and private interests, so that thoughts, words, and works, should make an approximate equality and set heaven in the heart, whereby heaven’s obverse dies out as grace grows. Domine dirige nos. Amen. Genesis 18, 19.” Mr Justice Hodges decided that the specific bequests were good, but all the other gifts, as well as the reversionary disposition of the testator’s landed estate to aborigines, were held to be void and inoperative, and the residue of the estate was ordered to be divided among the next of kin, as though the deceased had died intestate.