G22 CITATIONS FROM WRITINGS OF JURISTS AND ECONOMISTS. 



Hence the earth and all tilings therein are the general property of 

 all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the 

 Creator. And while the earth continued bare of inhabitants, it is rea- 

 sonable to suppose that all was in common among them, and that every 

 one took from the public stock, to his own use, such things as his imme- 

 diate* necessities required. 



These general notions of property were then sufficient to answer nil 

 the purposes of human life; and might perhaps still have answered 

 them, had it been possible for mankind to have remained in a state of 

 primeval simplicity : as may be collected from the manners of many Ameri- 

 can nations when first discovered by the Europeans; and from the 

 ancient method of living among the first Europeans them selves, if we may 

 credit either the memorials of them preserved in the golden age of the 

 poets, or the uniform accounts given by historians of those times, wherein 

 erant omnia communia et indivisa omnibus, veluti unum eunetis patri- 

 monium esset 1 . Not that this communion of goods seems ever to have 

 been applicable, even in the earliest ages, to aught but the substance of 

 the thing; nor could it be extended to the use of it. For, by the law 

 of nature and reason, he who first began to use it, acquired therein a 

 kind of transient property, that lasted so long as he was using it, and 

 no longer; or to speak with greater precision, the right of possession 

 continued for the same time only that the act of possession lasted 2 . 

 Tli us the ground was in common, and no part of it was the permanent 

 property of any man in particular; yet whoever was in the occupation of 

 any determined spot of it — for rest, for shade, or the like, — acquired for 

 the time a sort of ownership, from which it would have been unjust and 

 contrary to the law of nature, to have driven him by force: but the 

 instani that he quitted the use or occupation of it another might seize 

 it without injustice. Thus also a vine or other tree might be said to be 

 in common, as all men were equally entitled to its produce; and yet any 

 private individual might gain the sole property of the fruit which he had 

 gathered for his own repast. A doctrine well illustrated by Cicero, who 

 compares the world to a great* theatre, which is common to the public, 

 and yet the place which any man has taken is, for the time, his own. 3 



"But when mankind increased in number, craft, and ambition, it 

 became necessary to entertain conceptions of more permanent domin- 

 ion, and to appropriate to individuals not the immediate use only, but 

 the very substance of the thing to be used. Otherwise innumerable 

 tumults must have arisen, and the good order of the world been con- 

 tinually broken and disturbed, while a variety of persons were striving 

 who should get the first occupation of the same thing, or disputing 

 which of them had actually gained it. As human life also grew more 

 and more refined, abundance of conveniences were devised to render 

 it more easy, commodious and agreeable; as habitations for shelter and 

 safety, and raiment for warmth and decency. But no man would be at 

 the trouble to provide either so long as he had only an usufructuary 

 property in them which was to cease the instant that he quitted posses- 

 sion; if, as soon as he walked out of his tent, or pulled off his garment, 

 the next stranger who came by would have a right to inhabit the one 

 and to wear the other. In the case of habitations in particular, it was 

 natural to observe, that even the brute creation to whom everything 

 else was in common, maintained a kind of permanent property in their 



Mnstin, I, 13, c.I. 

 iBarbeyr. Pull'. I.4.C.4. 



15 Quemaclnioduui theatrnm cum commune sit, rectetamen did potest, ejus esse eum 

 locum quern quisque occuparit. De Fin. 1 o, c. 20. 



