Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/800

780 not have endured so long, nor would it have been adopted by all sorts of different races—from the ancient Irish to the Hindoos, and from the Russians to the Caffres and Japanese. These circumstances were in the main as follows: that there was plenty of land unoccupied; that population was very scanty and increased slowly; that wants were simple; that people were content to go on living in the same way, generation after generation; that there was no commerce worth speaking of; that manufactures were really that which they are etymologically—things made by the hands; and that there was no need of capital in the shape of money. Moreover, with such methods of warfare as then existed, the system was good for defense, and not bad for offense.

Yet, even if left to itself, to develop undisturbedly, without the intrusion of force, fraud, or militarism in any shape, the communal system, like the individual-owner system or the stateowner system, or any other system that the wit of man has yet devised, would sooner or later have had to face the everlasting agrarian difficulty. And the more the communities enjoyed general health, peace, and plenty, the sooner would the pressure of population upon the means of support make itself felt. The difficulty paraded by the opponents of individual ownership, that, by the extension of the private appropriation of the means of subsistence, the time would arrive when men would come into the world for whom there was no place, must needs make its appearance under any system, unless mankind are prevented from multiplying indefinitely. For, even if the habitable land is the property of the whole human race, the multiplication of that race must, as we have seen, sooner or later, bring its numbers up tp the maximum which the produce can support; and then the interesting problem in casuistry, which even absolute political ethics may find puzzling, will arise: Are we, who can just exist, bound to admit the new-comers who will simply starve themselves and us? If the rule that any one may exercise his freedom only so far as he does not interfere with the freedom of others is all-sufficient, it is clear that the new-comers will have no rights to exist at all, inasmuch as they will interfere most seriously with the freedom of their predecessors. The population question is the real riddle of the sphinx, to which no political Œdipus has as yet found the answer. In view of the ravages of the terrible monster over-multiplication, all other riddles sink into insignificance.

But to return to the question of the manner in which individual several ownership has, in our own and some other countries, superseded communal several ownership. There is an exceedingly instructive chapter in M. de Laveleye's well-known work on "Primitive Property," entitled "The Origin of Inequality