556 POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



involves a graduated ownership of land as it does a graduated 

 ownership of persons. 



Complete individualization of ownership is an accompani 

 ment of industrial progress. From the beginning, things 

 identified as products of a man s own labour are recognized 

 as his ; and throughout the course of civilization, communal 

 possession and joint household living, have not excluded the 

 recognition of a pcculium obtained by individual effort. Accu 

 mulation of movables privately possessed, arising in this way, 

 increases as militancy is restrained by growing industrialism ; 

 because this pre-supposes greater facility for disposing of 

 industrial products ; because there come along with it 

 measures of quantity and value, furthering exchange ; and 

 because the more pacific relations implied, render it safer 

 for men to detach themselves from the groups in which they 

 previously kept together for mutual protection. The indi 

 vidualization of ownership, extended and made more definite 

 by trading transactions under contract, eventually affects 

 the ownership of land. Bought and sold by measure and for 

 money, land is assimilated in this respect to the personal 

 property produced by labour ; and thus becomes, in the 

 general apprehension, confounded with it. But there is 

 reason to suspect that while private possession of things pro 

 duced by labour, will grow even more definite and sacred than 

 at present ; the inhabited area, which cannot be produced by 

 labour, will eventually be distinguished as something which 

 may not be privately possessed. As the individual, primitively 

 owner of himself, partially or wholly loses ownership of him 

 self during the militant regime, but gradually resumes it as 

 the industrial regime develops ; so, possibly, the communal 

 proprietorship of land, partially or wholly merged in the 

 ownership of dominant men during evolution of the militant 

 type, will be resumed as the industrial type becomes fully 

 evolved. 



