778 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



excellent ground for sundry probable conclusions* in the fact 

 that almost all parts of the world, and almost all nations, have 

 yielded evidence that, in the earliest settled condition we can get 

 at, land was held as private or several property, and not as the 

 property of the public, or general body of the nation. Now pri- 

 vate or several property may be held in one of two ways. The 

 ownership may be vested in a single individual person, in the 

 ordinary sense of that word ; or it may be vested in two or more 

 individuals forming a corporation or legal person ; that is to say, 

 an entity which has all the duties and responsibilities of an indi- 

 vidual person, but is composed of two or more individuals. It is 

 obvious that all the arguments which Rousseau uses against indi- 

 vidual land-ownership apply to corporate land-ownership. If the 

 rights of A, B, and C are individually nil, you can not make any 

 more of your by multiplying it by 3. (A, B, C) the corpora- 

 tion must be a usurper if A, B, and C, taken each by himself, is 

 so. Moreover, I think I may take it for granted that those who 

 desire to make the state universal land-owner would eject a cor- 

 poration from its estates with even less hesitation than they would 

 expel an individual. 



The particular method of early land-holding of which we have 

 the most wide-spread traces is that in which each of a great num- 

 ber of moderate-sized portions of the whole territory occupied by 

 a nation is held in complete and inalienable ownership f by the 

 males of a family, or of a small number of actual or supposed 

 kindred families, mutually responsible in blood feuds, and wor- 

 shiping the same God or Gods. No female had any share in the 

 ownership of the land. If she married outside the community, 

 she might take a share of the movables ; and, as a rule, she went 

 to her husband's community. If, however, the community was 

 short of hands, the husband might be taken into it, and then he 

 acquired all the rights and responsibilities of the other members. 

 Children born in the community became full members of it by 

 domicile, so to speak, not by heredity from their parents. This 

 primitive " city " was lodged in one or more dwellings, each usu- 

 ally standing in a patch of inclosed ground ; of arable land in the 

 immediate neighborhood of the dwellings ; while pasture and un- 

 cleared forest land lay outside all. Each commune was as jealous 

 of its rights of ownership as the touchiest of squires ; but, so long 

 as the population was as scanty in proportion to the occupied ter- 

 ritory as was usually the case in ancient times, the communities 

 got along pretty peaceably with one another. Any notion that all 



* For the difficulties which attach to the establishment of such probable conclusions, 

 see the remarkable work of M. Fustel de Coulanges, " Recherches sur quelques problemes 

 d'Histoire : Les Germains." 



f Inalienable, that is, without the consent of the whole owning community. 



