Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/85

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 69

the case of all feudal lords. The consequence evidently was that the feudal regime was a natural development of property as organized by the law of the quirites, just as in our day commercial and industrial trusts are a development of economic law as it was formulated, for instance, by the Code Napoleon. The organiza- tion of the colonial system extended from the frontiers, where its form was military, to the interior, where it was at first entirely economic; but where it ended by developing a corresponding legal and political regime. Thus the colonial system, in extending itself from the frontiers to the interior of the empire, prepared the way for the system of serfdom. Labor that was free, as com- pared with ancient personal slavery, began to be considered more profitable than that of chattels. The latter accordingly passed into a species of colonists. Thus the whole society tended to model itself upon the combined economic and military structure of the frontier colonies. The development of large proprietorship could have no other end than a tremendous advantage on the part of the owners, and in proportion to their economic power the latter increased in military importance, in right to administer justice, and at length in all the attributes of political sovereignty, according to a hierarchical scheme in accordance with the military and economic structure of the new society. Feudalism and the whole Middle Age regime thus issued directly from the empire. For two centuries the jurists had taught that provincial land was not susceptible of complete ownership; the dominium over it belonged by right of conquest to the state. The individual proprietors could have nothing more than possession and usufruct. In the fourth century of our era this distinction between Italian and provincial land no longer existed and for a long time the provincials were Roman citizens. At the same time, proprietor- ship lost its religious character. There was no longer any wor- ship of the god Terminus. There came to be cultivators who were at the same time judges and surveyors, who fixed boundaries and settled conflicts. Violation of boundaries is no longer sacri- lege, but crime. The military form of social structure, with the suppression of interior frontiers and their removal to a great