'M) 



property in land could any one member of a nomadic community have 

 had, who depended entirely upon the movements of the tribe, drove his 

 cattle and pitched his tents where he was protected by the number of his 

 fellows ? We need not therefore confine ourselves to Asia for evidences 

 of the phenomenon in question. " The whole soil of the Society Islands 

 belongs to the sovereign ; he portions out among the nobles, and makes 

 and resumes grants at his pleasure. "^S' No absolute individual property 

 in land was recognized among the Mexicans and Peruvians during the 

 period of their independence. All the land belonged to the state, and 

 in Peru was periodically resumed by the state, and parcelled out again 

 among the people. The Germans, in the time of Caesar and Tacitus, 

 had no piivate property in land. Every cultivator had land assigned 

 to him by the community, and was shifted annually to another loca- 

 tion. These constant changes were much facilitated by the vast tracts 

 of unoccupied land, as might be expected in a thinly peopled country. 

 Moreover, as agriculture was little practised, the wealth of the ancient 

 Germans consisting chiefly in cattle, we may presume that little skill 

 or capital was expended on the small portions of land actually under 

 tillage, and that the length and breadth of the country resembled a 

 vast common, which in reality it was. Among the Germanic con- 

 querors of Western and Southern Europe, all the conquered land 

 was claimed by the sovereign ; but the aristocratic institutions of 

 our northern ancestors did not allow the mass of the people to be 

 subjected to the will of one : they broke the monotony of general servi- 

 tude by establishing a powerful nobility between the monarch and the 

 people. The barons, the peers of the king, shared to a great extent 

 in the privilege which the state conferred upon its representatives. For 

 in an aristocracy, it is the body of nobles which makes up the legal 

 person of the state. Hence in mediaeval Europe, though the state was 

 still, in theory, the owner of all the land, and the king the lord suserain 

 of all his vassals, yet, practically, a limited ownership was conferred 

 upon the freemen, of w^hich the nation consisted. 



In England the crown is still, in legal language, the owner of the 

 soil, and the highest title a subject can claim is that of tenant of the 

 fee, and the terms of his tenancy made originally the only difference in 

 the extent of interests in estates. Nor is this right of the crown theo- 

 retical only. The crown claims and sells all the waste lands in the 

 colonies ; and the same is done by the republican government of the 

 United States, which is the acknowledged owner of the vast extent of 

 unsettled territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific. At the 

 colonization of Canada by the French, in the 17th century, the land of 



• Narrative of a Visit to Brazils, &c , by C. F. Mathison. 



