Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-40.djvu/750

730 sion of all its fruit. Two or three good harvesters will thus become owners of sixty or seventy bushels of nuts, part of which they will eat during the winter, and part they will sell to their slower-footed or lazier school-fellows, whose share of the common crop is nothing at all.

Although the community thus permits individuals to acquire at will what we may call great fortunes in walnuts, wealth far out of proportion to their relative numbers, yet the state still retains a certain measure of control over the trees, and thus shows that it regards the old idea of common property as still living. This fact is clearly shown in the regulations made by what we may call the tribal assembly as to the time for beginning the harvest. In very early times it was found that the keen competition for the possession of the trees led certain boys to go out and begin harvest in September, before the nuts had ripened. To prevent the great waste thus caused, it was agreed among the boys that no harvesting should be thereafter permitted before a suitable date, to be annually agreed upon. The fixing of this day is always a matter of interest to the community, and is sometimes the cause of a great political excitement. In 1884 the school was divided into two parties, favoring different dates. The one party found its leaders among the members of the debating society, or the literary class, as they would be called in the outer world; the other faction was under the lead of the landed aristocracy, who were charged by their opponents with the intention of subverting the rights of the popular assembly and setting up an oligarchy. When the question came to a decision, the literary clique posted upon the wall of the play-room a resolution naming the date they favored as the time for beginning the harvest, and invited all to sign their names below in token of support of their proposition. The aristocracy, however, made active efforts, and carried the day by a very large majority.

The community regards the trees as common property, to be annually distributed among the citizens. The title to the trees acquired by shaking them expires with the year; and in the next harvest the fruit again becomes the possession of all, to be shared only after permission has been granted by the tribe. By this arrangement the great inequalities of wealth brought about in any given year are partially remedied in succeeding seasons, and class-distinctions between the rich and the poor are prevented.

In other forms of property, however, a permanent right of possession has been established, and great inequality of condition has resulted, with a consequent "progress and poverty" humorously interesting to reflective outsiders, but serious enough to the "McDonogh boys" themselves.

The revolution in the system of property rights has gone farthest in the chancres effected in the estates in the "rabbit-land." In these the old rights of common have entirely disappeared, and new customs have grown up which recognize land as private property. The new system has been so far perfected as to get nearly all the good land, that is, good as a home for rabbits, into the hands of a few great landlords; but in late years a socialistic party has appeared among the poor boys,