40 History of the English Landed Interest. 



situations as they think proper, and oblige, them to remove the 

 succeeding yeari'^ For this practice the}'- assign several reasons, 

 lest they should be led, by being accustomed to one spot, to 

 exchange the toils of war for the business of agriculture ; lest 

 they should acquire a passion for possessing extensive domains, 

 and the more powerful should be tempted to dispossess the 

 weaker ; lest they should construct buildings with more art 

 than is necessary to protect them from the inclemencies of the 

 weather ; lest the love of money should arise amongst them, 

 the source of factions and discussions; and in order that other 

 people, beholding their own possessions equal to those of the 

 most powerful, might be retained by the bonds of equity and 

 moderation. 



Struck by so unusual a system, the historian took care to make 

 minute inquiries into its causes, thereby as it were, uncon- 

 sciously anticipating the reluctance of modern scholars to con- 

 ceive a system of existence which was neither wholly nomadic 

 nor wholly stationary, but at first sight an aimless mixture of 

 the two. And yet this artificially constructed life, with its 

 alternate occupation of the tribal lands, accounts for the slovenly 

 husbandry and indifference to improvements of a permanent 

 nature freely commented on by both historians. It was not, be 

 it understood, the modern backwoodsman's expedient of ex- 

 exhausting the natural fertility of the soil and then leaving it 

 for fresh ground. One Teutonic community, so we understand 

 Caesar, merely took up the agricultural process on ground 

 vacated by some other. It was in fact an existence consider- 

 ably less primitive than the pastoral stage of man's develop- 

 ment, and less civilised than that to which the Greek or 

 Roman had attained. There was none of the wild passion for 

 wandering which drove ever forwards their Scythian fore- 

 fathers or which imbues the restless blood of the modern 

 Bedouin. To avoid the indolent habits of an otiose life and to 

 maintain paramount the communal interests over those of the 

 individual, the central power kept the people moving, and this 

 was the germ of a policy which might very soon blossom into 

 all the educated ideas associated with imperial interests. In 

 fact, the Teuton, as described by Caesar and Tacitus, appears at 



