ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN. 781 



in Landed Property." And I select M. de Laveleye as a witness 

 the more willingly, because lie draws very different conclusions 

 from the facts he so carefully adduces to those which they appear 

 to me to support. 



After enumerating various countries in which, as M. de Lave- 

 leye thinks, inequality and an aristocracy were the result of con- 

 quest, he asks very pertinently : 



But how were they developed in such countries as Germany, which know 

 nothing of conquerors coming to create a privileged caste above a vanquished 

 and enslaved population ? Originally we see in Germany associations of free and 

 independent peasants like the inhabitants of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden at 

 the present day. At the close of the middle ages we find, in the same country, a 

 feudal aristocracy resting more heavily on the soil, and a rustic population more 

 completely enslaved than in England, Italy, or France (p. 222). 



The author proceeds to answer the question which he pro- 

 pounds by showing, in the first place, that the admission of the 

 right of individuals and their heirs to the land they had re- 

 claimed, which was so general, if not universal, created heredi- 

 tary individual property alongside the communal property, so 

 that private estates arose in the waste between the sparse com- 

 munal estates. Now, it was not every family or member of a 

 community that was enterprising enough to go out and clear 

 waste lands, or that had the courage to defend its possessions 

 when once obtained. The originally small size of the domains 

 thus acquired, and the strong stimulus of personal interest, led to 

 the introduction of better methods of cultivation than those tra- 

 ditional in the communes. And, finally, as the private owner got 

 little or no benefit from the community, he was exempted from 

 the charges and corvees laid upon its members. The result, as 

 may be imagined, was that the private proprietors, aided by serf- 

 labor, prospered more than the communities cultivated by their 

 free members, seriously hampered them by occupying fresh waste 

 lands, yielded more produce, and furnished wealth, which, with 

 the help of the majorat system, remained concentrated in the 

 hands of owners who, in virtue of their possessions, could main- 

 tain retainers ; while, freed from the need to labor, they could 

 occupy themselves with war and the chase, and, as nobles, attend 

 the sovereign. On the other hand, their brethren, left behind in 

 the communes, had little chance of growing individually rich or 

 powerful, and had to give themselves up to agricultural toil. The 

 Bishop of Oxford, in his well-known " Constitutional History of 

 England " (vol. i, p. 51), puts the case, as his wont is, concisely 

 and precisely : " As the population increased, and agriculture 

 itself improved, the mark system must have been superseded 

 everywhere." No doubt, when the nobles had once established 

 themselves, they often added force and fraud to their other means 



