ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 777 



such, a statement as that the primitive land-owner was. either a 

 robber or a cheat ; but, in the course of the century and a half 

 which has elapsed since he wrote, and especially in that of the last 

 fifty years, an immense amount of information on the subject of 

 ancient land-tenure has come to light ; so that it is no longer par- 

 donable, in any one, to content himself with Rousseau's ignorance. 

 Even a superficial glance over the results of modern investiga- 

 tions into anthropology, archaeology, ancient law, and ancient re- 

 ligion, suffices to show that there is not a particle of evidence that 

 men ever existed in Rousseau's state of nature, and that there are 

 very strong reasons for thinking that they never could have done 

 so, and never will do so. 



It is, at the least, highly probable that the nomadic preceded 

 any other social state ; and, as the needs of a wandering hunter's 

 or pastor's life are far more simple than any other, it follows that 

 the inequalities of condition must be less obvious among nomads 

 than among settled people. Men who have no costume at all, for 

 example, can not be said to be unequally clothed ; they are, doubt- 

 less, more equal than men some of whom are well clothed and 

 others in rags, though the equality is of the negative sort. But it 

 is a profound mistake to imagine that, in the nomadic condition, 

 any more than in any other which has yet been observed, men are 

 either " free " or " equal " in Rousseau's sense. I can call to mind 

 no nomadic nation in which women are on an equality with men ; 

 nor any in which young men are on the same footing as old men ; 

 nor any in which family groups, bound together by blood ties, 

 by their mutual responsibility for bloodshed and by common 

 worship, do not constitute corporate political units, in the sense of 

 the city * of the Greeks and Romans. A " state of nature " in 

 which noble and peaceful, but nude and propertyless, savages sit 

 in solitary meditation under trees, unless they are dining or amus- 

 ing themselves in other ways, without cares or responsibilities of 

 any sort, is simply another figment of the unscientific imagination. 

 The only uncivilized men of whom anything is really known are 

 hampered by superstitions and enslaved by conventions, as strange 

 as those of the most artificial societies, to an almost incredible de- 

 gree. Furthermore, I think, it may be said with much confidence 

 that the primitive "land-grabber" did not either force or cheat 

 his co-proprietors into letting him fence in a bit of the land which 

 hitherto was the property of all. 



The truth is, we do not know, and probably never shall know 

 completely, the nature of all the various processes by which the 

 ownership of land was originally brought about. But there is 



* I may remind the reader that, in their original senses, ir6\is and civitas mean, not an 

 aggregation of houses, but a corporation. In this sense, the City of London is formed by 

 the freemen of the city, with their common councilors, aldermen, and lord mayor. 



