Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/802

782 of enlarging their borders. But, to begin with, the inequality was the result, not of militarism, but of industrialism. Clearing a piece of land for the purpose of cultivating it and reaping the crops for one's own advantage is surely an industrial operation, if ever there was one.

Secondly, M. de Laveleye points out that the Church was a great devourer of commune lands:

"We know that a member of the commune could only dispose of his share with the consent of his associates, who had a right of resumption; but this right could not be exercised against the Church. Accordingly, in these days of religious fervor, the faithful frequently left to the Church all that they possessed, not only their house and its inclosure, but the undivided share in the mark attached to it"(p. 225). Thus an abbot, or a bishop, became coproprietor with the peasants of a commune; and, with such a cuckoo in the nest, one can conceive that the hedge-sparrows might have a bad time. "Already by the end of the ninth century one third of the whole soil of Gaul belonged to the clergy" (p. 225). But, if the men who left their property to the Church believed that they got their quid pro quo in the shape of masses for their souls, as they certainly did; and if the churchmen believed as sincerely (and they certainly did) that they gave valuable consideration for the property left them, where does fraud come in? Is it not again a truly industrial operation? Indeed, a keen-witted and eminent Scotch judge once called a huge bequest to a church "fire insurance," so emphatically commercial did the transaction appear to him.

Thirdly, personal several property was carved out of the corporate communal property in another fashion, to which no objection can be taken by industrialism. Plots of arable land were granted to members of the commune who were skilled artificers, as a salary for their services. The craft transmitting itself from father to son, the land went with it and grew into an hereditary benefice.

Fourthly, Sir Henry Maine has proved in a very striking manner, from the collection of the Brehon laws of ancient Ireland, how the original communal land-ownership of the sept, with the allotment of an extra allowance of pasture to the chief, as the honorarium for his services of all kinds, became modified, in consequence of the power of keeping more cattle than the rest of the sept, thus conferred on the chief. He became a lender of cattle at a high rate of interest to his more needy sept fellows, who when they borrowed became bound to do him service in other ways and lost status by falling into the position of his debtors. Hence the chief gradually acquired the characteristics of what naturalists