552 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



creased opportunity for those sales which further the accu 

 mulation of a peculium, and by the use of measures of 

 quantity and value: these being implied primarily by such 

 sales, and secondarily by the sale arid division of all that has 

 been held in common. 



Spread of private ownership, which thus goes along with 

 decay of the system of status and growth of the system 

 of contract, naturally passes on from movable property to 

 fixed property. Tor when the multiplication of trading 

 transactions has made it possible for each member of a 

 family-community to accumulate a peculium; and when the 

 strengthening desire for individual domestic life has im 

 pelled the majority of the community to sell the land which 

 they have jointly inherited ; the several portions of it, 

 whether sold to separate members of the body or to strangers, 

 are thus reduced by definite agreement to the form of indi 

 vidual properties; and private ownership of land thereby 

 acquires a character apparently like that of other private 

 ownership. In other ways, too, this result is furthered 



by developing industrialism. If, omitting as not relevant 

 the cases in which the absolute ruler allows no rights of pro 

 perty, landed or other, to his subjects, we pass to the cases in 

 which a conqueror recognizes a partial ownership of land by 

 those to whom he has parcelled it out on condition of render 

 ing services and paying dues, we see that the private land- 

 ownership established by militancy is an incomplete one. It 

 has various incompletenesses. The ownership by the suzerain 

 is qualified by the rights he has made over to his vassals ; 

 the rights of the vassals are qualified by the conditions of 

 their tenure ; and they are further qualified by the claims of 

 serfs and other dependents, who, while bound to specified 

 services, have specified shares of produce. But with the 

 decline of militancy and concomitant disappearance of vassal 

 age, the obligations of the tenure diminish and finally almost 

 lapse out of recognition ; while, simultaneously, abolition of 

 serfdom destroys or obscures the other claims which qualified 



