Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/798

778 excellent ground for sundry probable conclusions in the fact that almost all parts of the world, and almost all nations, have yielded evidence that, in the earliest settled condition we can get at, land was held as private or several property, and not as the property of the public, or general body of the nation. Now private or several property may be held in one of two ways. The ownership may be vested in a single individual person, in the ordinary sense of that word; or it may be vested in two or more individuals forming a corporation or legal person; that is to say, an entity which has all the duties and responsibilities of an individual person, but is composed of two or more individuals. It is obvious that all the arguments which Rousseau uses against individual land-ownership apply to corporate land-ownership. If the rights of A, B, and C are individually nil, you can not make any more of your 0 by multiplying it by 3. (A, B, C)—the corporation—must be a usurper if A, B, and C, taken each by himself, is so. Moreover, I think I may take it for granted that those who desire to make the state universal land-owner would eject a corporation from its estates with even less hesitation than they would expel an individual.

The particular method of early land-holding of which we have the most wide-spread traces is that in which each of a great number of moderate-sized portions of the whole territory occupied by a nation is held in complete and inalienable ownership by the males of a family, or of a small number of actual or supposed kindred families, mutually responsible in blood feuds, and worshiping the same God or Gods. No female had any share in the ownership of the land. If she married outside the community, she might take a share of the movables; and, as a rule, she went to her husband's community. If, however, the community was short of hands, the husband might be taken into it, and then he acquired all the rights and responsibilities of the other members. Children born in the community became full members of it by domicile, so to speak, not by heredity from their parents. This primitive "city" was lodged in one or more dwellings, each usually standing in a patch of inclosed ground; of arable land in the immediate neighborhood of the dwellings; while pasture and uncleared forest land lay outside all. Each commune was as jealous of its rights of ownership as the touchiest of squires; but, so long as the population was as scanty in proportion to the occupied territory as was usually the case in ancient times, the communities got along pretty peaceably with one another. Any notion that all