VII ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN 323 



grabber " did not either force or cheat his co- 

 proprietors into letting him fence in a bit of the 

 land which hitherto was the property of all. 



The truth is we do not know, and, probably, 

 never shall know completely, the nature of all the 

 various processes by which the ownership of land 

 was originally brought about. But there is ex- 

 cellent ground for sundry probable conclusions l 

 in the fact that almost all parts of the world, and 

 almost all nations, have yielded evidence that, in 

 the earliest settled condition we can get at, land 

 was held as private or several property, and not 

 as the property of the public, or general body of 

 the nation. Now private or several property may 

 be held in one of two ways. The ownership may 

 be vested in a single individual person, in the 

 ordinary sense of that word ; or it may be vested 

 in two or more individuals forming a corporation 

 or legal person ; that is to say, an entity which 

 has all the duties and responsibilities of an in- 

 dividual person, but is composed of two or more 

 individuals. It is obvious that all the arguments 

 which Rousseau uses against individual land- 

 ownership apply to corporate landownership. If 

 the rights of A, B, and C are individually nil, you 

 cannot make any more of your by multiplying 

 it by three. (A B C) the corporation must be 



1 For the difficulties which attach to the establishment of 

 such probable conclusions, see the remarkable work of M. Fustel 

 de Coulanges Recherches sur quclques problemcs d Hat 

 Germains. 



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