Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/857

 LAND-TENURE

LAND-TENURE

Land-Tenure in the Christian Era. — The way in

which land has been held or owned during the nineteen hundred years which have seen in Europe the rise and establishment of the Church is a matter for historical inquiry. Strictly speaking, the way in which such ownership or tenure was not only legally arranged, but ethically regarded, is a matter for historical inquiry also. But the determination from record of motive and of mental attitude is always a disputable thing, whereas the determination of legal definition and of public acts is a matter of documentary and of ascer- tainable record. During the last two generations certain theories of the State, based, in their turn, upon a vague and general, but appreciable, philosophy, have made of the ethical history of land-tenure or land own- ing a capital point of discussion, and, to support what was until lately the chief academic view, recorded and ascertainable history was pressed and even warped into the service of theory.

It is the object of this article to set forth what is rigidly ascertainable in the matter, to distinguish it from what is doubtful, and again from what is merely hypothetical.

The modern theory to which allusion is here made is the conception that property in all its forms has no direct relation with personality, is not an extension of nor support of Inmian dignity and the hiunan will (which, strictly, can only attach to persons), but is a mechanical arrangement or institution deriving its authority from the State, not from the nature of man, and not, therefore, from the purpose of his Creator. In this aspect of property many modern apologists, apparently divergent, join. Thus, he who will assert that property is necessary in order to give the required impetus to human effort, or that its acquisition is the proper reward of the virtue (as he imagines it to be) of cunning, or that men must endure it as a necessary evil proceeding from the imperfections of their nature, is really at one in his general theory of the thing with his apparently irreconcilable opponent who will assert that property is robbery because its existence tends to produce an inequality in material enjo>-ment. Again, the philosopher who analyses what is called economic, or Ricardian, rent, and emphasizes its collective qual- ity, however much he may privately support the laws that defend private property, betrays by his whole method of thought his conception that property is adventitious and not native to man. In general, all that wave of non-Christian and (in its acuteness) anti- Christian thought which the nineteenth century has suffered, regards property, among other human estalv lishments, as a thing not having about it that quality which we call sacred. It reposes upon no ultimate moral sanction: it is a function to be expressed in terras of common or private utility. The far-reaching consequences of this philosophy it is not the purpose of these pages to discuss; it has produced, not only the insecurity and the extended poverty, but also the shameless financial spirit of our time; it has put specu- lation in the place of production, and removed in so far as it has been powerful the permanent economic bases of society.

The opposite philosophy bears no name; and here we have a phenomenon to be paralleled in many an- other case. Thus we know the modern attitude which regards matrimony as a contract, but we have no name for the view of that vast majority to which such a conception is repulsive. Again, we can hallmark the modern conception that the State has no authority over the citizen — the theory called Anarchist— but we have no name for the public and popular philosophy of the vast maiority to which such a doctrine is funda- mentally immoral. We must proceed, therefore, without a strict nomenclature, and postulate, what all modern observers will immediately admit, the con- trast between those who have with regard to property in all its forms the novel attitude described, and those

who continue to repose in the older conception of property as a thing connected with the ultimate ethi- cal sense of man.

For the purposes of this article the interest of that great quarrel lies in this: that the academies and uni- versities (from which centres of intellectualism, of course, all such novelties, long-lived or short-lived, proceed), in their determination to disestablish the- sense of property as an absolute thing, have pressed into their service historical evidence; and this is especially the case in regard to property in land. Man is a land animal: without land he cannot live. AU that he consumes and every condition of his material being is ultimately referable to land. Nay, the prime condition of all, mere space in which to extend hi* being, involves the occupation of land. Land, there- fore, in all ages has been safeguarded in a peculiar manner from the perils which attach to the abuse, or even the natural process, of private property in any material. And whether those safeguards have been, or are, an assertion of the ultimate dominion of the State over land, or institutions to make inheritance in land secure, or to safeguard it against the fluctuation of fortune, or to guarantee a proportion of it for what is essential to the common life of men, or to forbid its acquisition in more than certain areas by one family — no matter what the guarantees are or have been, they ultimately repose upon the prime and self-evident truth that without land man cannot be. To the truth that land is necessary for the Ufe of man, an- other truth equally self-evident lends added force, to wit, that, whereas all other forms of property can be replaced, land cannot be replaced. A man or a group of men can, if the laws be suiEclently bad or sufficiently laxly observed, forestall the market in wheat so as to control the whole supply of wheat for a certain period, but they cannot control it for more than a certain period unless they also control the land, for wheat is perishable. Perishable, also, is every other form of things subject to private property, with the exception of land. Vest alt the land in the community in one family or one group of families, make their tenure of it fixed, and it is self-evident that the whole of the com- munity will be utterly dependent upon it or them. In other words, a State must, if it is to remain a State, set up in the case of land guarantees and safeguards against the perils attaching to the institution of prop- erty which it need not set up in the case of other forms of property.

We shall, therefore, always find in the historical records of everj' community, however fixed and abso- lute its conception of the right of private property in land, some land held in common, some land the prop- erty of the State or the municipality, and even that land which is in the hands of individuals or corpora- tions treated legally in a manner different from, stricter than, and contrasting with, the manner in which other forms of property will be treated.

Seizing upon this truth, the school of philosophy alluded to above has attempted to establish a scheme of historical progress wholly hypothetical. It has been pretended that men in their first conception of land thought of it as mere space, heritable Ijy none and open to all: that from this men, organized in .strict communities, proceeded to give the community rights over land which it forbade to individuals, and to leave the government of the tribe or of the village absolute and continual power — and power haliitually and fre- quently exercised — to determine a common tillage and a common pasture. Next (this hypothesis imagined) the mutations of allotment grew rarer, and the watch- ing of common rights less jealous, imtil at last were found — what every man can now see round him in European civilization — a number of private proper- ties, and side liv side with them a certain proportion of conmiunal and pubUc territory. The rights which are exercised over this last or ancient customs which