Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/796

776 men, it is surely essential that there should be a statute of limitations in respect of the consequences of wrong-doing. As there is nothing more fatal to nobility of personal character than the nursing of the feeling of revenge—nothing that more clearly indicates a barbarous state of society than the carrying on of a vendetta, generation after generation—so I take it to be a plain maxim of that political ethic which does not profess to have any greater authority than agreeableness to good feeling and good sense can confer, that the evil deeds of former generations—especially if they were in accordance with the practices of a less advanced civilization, and had the sanction of a less refined morality—should, as speedily as possible, be forgotten and buried under better things.

"Musst immer thun wie neu geboren" (must ever do as if new-born) is the best of all maxims for the guidance of the life of states, no less than of individuals. However, I express what I personally think, in all humility, in the face of the too patent fact that there are persons of light and leading—with a political authority to which I can make not the remotest pretension, and with a weight of political responsibility which I rejoice to think can never rest on my shoulders—who by no means share my opinion, but who, on the contrary, deem it right to fan the sparks of revenge which linger among the embers of ancient discords; and to stand between the dead past and the living present, not with the healing purpose of the Jewish leader, but rather to intensify the plague of political strife, and hold aloft the brazen image of the father's wrongs, lest the children might perchance forget and forgive.

However, the question whether the fact that property in land was originally acquired by force invalidates all subsequent dealings in that property so completely, that no lapse of time, no formal legalization, no passing from hand to hand by free contract through an endless series of owners, can extinguish the right of the nation to take it away by force from the latest proprietor, has rather an academic than a practical interest, so long as the evidence that landed ownership did so arise is wanting. Potent an organon as the a priori method may be, its employment in the region of history has rarely been found to yield satisfactory results; and, in this particular case, the confident assertions that land was originally held in common by the whole nation, and that it has been converted into severalty by force, as the outcome of the military spirit rather than by the consent, or contract, characteristic of industrialism, are singularly ill-founded.

Let us see what genuine history has to say to these assertions. Perhaps it might have been pardonable in Rousseau to propound