77 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men, it is surely essential that there should he a statute of limita- 

 tions in respect of the consequences of wrong-doing. As there is 

 nothing more fatal to nobility of personal character than the nurs- 

 ing of the feeling of revenge nothing that more clearly indicates 

 a barbarous state of society than the carrying on of a vendetta, 

 generation after generation so I take it to be a plain maxim of 

 that political ethic which does not profess to have any greater 

 authority than agreeableness to good feeling and good sense can 

 confer, that the evil deeds of former generations especially if 

 they were in accordance with the practices of a less advanced 

 civilization, and had the sanction of a less refined morality 

 should, as speedily as possible, be forgotten and buried under 

 better things. 



"Musst immer thun wie neu geboren" (must ever do as if 

 new-born) is the best of all maxims for the guidance of the life of 

 states, no less than of individuals. However, I express what I 

 personally think, in all humility, in the face of the too patent fact 

 that there are persons of light and leading with a political au- 

 thority to which I can make not the remotest pretension, and 

 with a weight of political responsibility which I rejoice to think 

 can never rest on my shoulders who by no means share my opin- 

 ion, but who, on the contrary, deem it right to fan the sparks of 

 revenge which linger among the embers of ancient discords ; and 

 to stand between the dead past and the living present, not with 

 the healing purpose of the Jewish leader, but rather to intensify 

 the plague of political strife, and hold aloft the brazen image of 

 the father's wrongs, lest the children might perchance forget and 

 forgive. 



However, the question whether the fact that property in land 

 was originally acquired by force invalidates all subsequent deal- 

 ings in that property so completely, that no lapse of time, no for- 

 mal legalization, no passing from hand to hand by free contract 

 through an endless series of owners, can extinguish the right of 

 the nation to take it away by force from the latest proprietor, has 

 rather an academic than a practical interest, so long as the evi- 

 dence that landed ownership did so arise is wanting. Potent an 

 organon as the a priori method may be, its employment in the 

 region of history has rarely been found to yield satisfactory re- 

 sults ; and, in this particular case, the confident assertions that 

 land was originally held in common by the whole nation, and that 

 it has been converted into severalty by force, as the outcome of 

 the military spirit rather than by the consent, or contract, charac- 

 teristic of industrialism, are singularly ill-founded. 



Let us see what genuine history has to say to these assertions. 

 Perhaps it might have been pardonable in Rousseau to propound 



