Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/797

Rh such, a statement as that the primitive land-owner was. either a robber or a cheat; but, in the course of the century and a half which has elapsed since he wrote, and especially in that of the last fifty years, an immense amount of information on the subject of ancient land-tenure has come to light; so that it is no longer pardonable, in any one, to content himself with Rousseau's ignorance. Even a superficial glance over the results of modern investigations into anthropology, archæology, ancient law, and ancient religion, suffices to show that there is not a particle of evidence that men ever existed in Rousseau's state of nature, and that there are very strong reasons for thinking that they never could have done so, and never will do so.

It is, at the least, highly probable that the nomadic preceded any other social state; and, as the needs of a wandering hunter's or pastor's life are far more simple than any other, it follows that the inequalities of condition must be less obvious among nomads than among settled people. Men who have no costume at all, for example, can not be said to be unequally clothed; they are, doubtless, more equal than men some of whom are well clothed and others in rags, though the equality is of the negative sort. But it is a profound mistake to imagine that, in the nomadic condition, any more than in any other which has yet been observed, men are either "free" or "equal" in Rousseau's sense. I can call to mind no nomadic nation in which women are on an equality with men; nor any in which young men are on the same footing as old men; nor any in which family groups, bound together by blood ties, by their mutual responsibility for bloodshed and by common worship, do not constitute corporate political units, in the sense of the city of the Greeks and Romans. A "state of nature" in which noble and peaceful, but nude and propertyless, savages sit in solitary meditation under trees, unless they are dining or amusing themselves in other ways, without cares or responsibilities of any sort, is simply another figment of the unscientific imagination. The only uncivilized men of whom anything is really known are hampered by superstitions and enslaved by conventions, as strange as those of the most artificial societies, to an almost incredible degree. Furthermore, I think, it may be said with much confidence that the primitive "land-grabber" did not either force or cheat his co-proprietors into letting him fence in a bit of the land which hitherto was the property of all.

The truth is, we do not know, and probably never shall know completely, the nature of all the various processes by which the ownership of land was originally brought about. But there is