64 PROCEEDINGS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. 



sufficient for our purpose to know tliat over Europe and a large part 

 of Asia it was practically universal, and that in India, Russia, the 

 Slavonic portions of Turkey in Europe, and some parts of Germany, 

 it exists to the present day with its essential features well preserved. 

 Even in Great Britain and Ireland some of these features are quite 

 discernible. The folk-moots, allotments and re-allotments of land, 

 commons, and other local institutions and customs in England ; 

 community of tenui-e of land in Scotland ; the sept in Ireland, and 

 the gavelkind in Kent are all survivals of the Aryan village com- 

 munity. The keen and persistent desire of the peasant to own a 

 piece of land — the "land-hunger," as it has been well called — is not 

 a desire of modern growth. It is rather a survival from a time 

 when the peasant had a real share in the ownership of the land, 

 when, though there was no part of it which he could claim per- 

 manently as his, there was no part of the common area in which he 

 had not as much proprietary interest as his neighbor. Less than 

 two hundred years ago there were large ai'eas of commons scattered 

 over England. Much of this land has been enclosed and handed over 

 to private owners under the authority of Acts of Parliament. It is 

 doubtful whether the people of the various localities, the real owners, 

 were ever reimbursed for their loss ; it is quite certain that the sense 

 of their loss has never died out, and that this feeling is strong enough 

 to give effect to the clamour for allotments, facetiously designated as 

 a demand for " three acres and a cow." Even the practice of " boy- 

 cotting," now so frequently resorted to in Ireland, is not a modern 

 device, but a survival, telling us of a time when the ordinary 

 method of punishing a man for practices obnoxious to his neighbors 

 was to " send him to Coventry." 



In the days of Charles I., the village community had more of its 

 features in a state of sound preservation in England than it has now 

 Worthy of special notice is the government of local affairs by means 

 of local assemblies of the people. This custom was transplanted to 

 New England by the Puritan exiles, and on the virgin political soil 

 it grew and flourished. The well-known New England " town 

 meeting " is the direct offspring of the Old England folk-moot. In 

 the Puritan colony each little district managed its own local affairs 

 by means of public meetings in which each head of a family had the 

 same authority as every other, and in many of them a portion of the 

 public domain was held in common and occasionally, if not periodi- 



