vil ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 321 



verted into severalty by force, as the outcome of 

 the military spirit rather than by the consent, or 

 contract, characteristic of industrialism, are sin- 

 gularly ill-founded. 



Let us see what genuine history has to say to 

 these assertions. Perhaps it might have been 

 pardonable in Rousseau to propound such a state- 

 ment as that the primitive landowner was either a 

 robber or a cheat ; but, in the course of the century 

 and a half which has elapsed since he wrote, and 

 especially in that of the last fifty years, an 

 immense amount of information on the subject of 

 ancient land-tenure has come to light ; so that it 

 is no longer pardonable, in any one, to content 

 himself with Rousseau's ignorance. Even a super- 

 ficial glance over the results of modern investiga- 

 tions into anthropology, archaeology, ancient law 

 and ancient religion, suffices to show that there is 

 not a particle of evidence that men ever existed 

 in Rousseau's state of nature, and that there are 

 very strong reasons for thinking that they never 

 could have done so, and never will do so. 



It is, at the least, highly probable that the 

 nomadic preceded any other social state ; and, as 

 the needs of a wandering hunter's or pastor's life 

 are far more simple than any other, it follows that 

 the inequalities of condition must be less obvious 

 among nomads than among settled people. Men 

 who have no costume at all, for example, cannot 

 be said to be unequally clothed ; they are, doubt- 



VOL. I Y 



