PROPERTY. 555 



to be marked off with some definiteness ; but it is not indi 

 vidualized in respect of land, because, under the conditions, 

 no individual claims can be shown, or could be effectually 

 marked off were they shown. 



With the passage from a nomadic to a settled state, owner 

 ship of land by the community becomes qualified by indi 

 vidual ownership; but only to the extent that those who 

 clear and cultivate portions of the surface have undisturbed 

 enjoyment of its produce. Habitually the public claim sur 

 vives ; and either when, after a few crops, the cleared tract 

 is abandoned, or when, after transmission to descendants, it 

 has ceased to be used by them, it reverts to the community. 

 And this system of temporary ownership, congruous with 

 the sentiments and usages inherited from ancestral nomads, 

 is associated also with an undeveloped agriculture : land 

 becoming exhausted after a few years. 



Where the patriarchal form of organization has been 

 carried from the pastoral state into the settled state, and, 

 sanctified by tradition, is also maintained for purposes of 

 mutual protection, possession of land partly by the clan and 

 partly by the family, long continues ; at the same time that 

 there is separate possession of things produced by separate 

 labour. And while in some cases the communal land- 

 ownership, or family land-ownership, survives, it in other 

 cases yields in various modes and degrees to qualified forms 

 of private ownership, mostly temporary, and subject to 

 supreme ownership by the public. 



But war, both by producing class-differentiations within 

 each society, and by effecting the subjugation of one society 

 by another, undermines or destroys communal proprietorship 

 of land ; and partly or wholly substitutes for it, either the 

 unqualified proprietorship of an absolute conqueror, or pro 

 prietorship by a conqueror qualified by the claims of vassals* 

 holding it under certain conditions, while their claims are 

 in turn qualified by those of dependents attached to the soil. 

 That is to say, the system of status which militancy develops, 



