lo History of the English Landed Interest. 



verj"- much the same sj^stems of land tenure and agriculture. 

 Speaking generall}^, thej^ fit themselves to their environment, 

 often assimilating into their own constitutional sj^stem what- 

 ever strikes them as familiar and applicable in the customs of, 

 the fresh peoples amidst which their nomadic or rapacious in- 

 stincts have led them to settle. 



This is strikingly illustrated in the history of the Hebrews. 

 Nomadic and pastoral by instinct, they were compelled to 

 revolutionise their habits in a land like Egypt, where the 

 business of the flock-master was an " abomination." At the 

 exodus, once again free to follow their own bent, thej^ became 

 nomadic, until their occupation of Palestine, a country fitted 

 rather for agriculture than a pastoral life, a second time entirely 

 altered their land system. 



Compare, too, the procedure of a commercial and civilised 

 nationality, such as the English, when colonising large tracts 

 of uncultivated territories in America, Australia, and the Cape. 

 The tendency is to revert to one of those stages through which 

 our nation has already passed. In the earlier portion of the 

 seventeenth century there still survived minute traces of the 

 old communal polity. For this cause the Pilgrim Fathers in- 

 troduced into New England the old sj^stem of common field 

 tenure. Later on, however, the marked individualism of the 

 overlord eclipses all the earlier tribal instincts. The modern 

 backwoodsman isolates himself from his fellows, and makes a 

 hut, and clears ground for his own individual wants. Uncon- 

 sciously, jjerhaps, he adapts the policy of the pastoral aboriginal 

 to his own system. Like that primitive nomad, he exhausts 

 the soil with his crops, as the latter once upon a time exhausted 

 its herbage with his herds ; then, like him, untrammelled by 

 the laws and customs of a community, he passes forward to 

 fresh sources of pristine fertility and starts afresh. 



Nations, then, which, like Imperial Rome, had long lost touch 

 with their primitive tribal polity, would instinctively revert to 

 it when brought into contact with semi-civilised peoples. It 

 is then evident, in the first place, that any information which 

 we can scrape together bearing on Rome's earliest system of 

 land tenure, will be valuable to the subject in hand. We 



