Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/774



has done good service to the English reader in translating this important essay upon the origin of property in land. That land in primitive times was held in common by the tribe or village, had settled almost into an axiom of economic history. M. Fustel de Coulanges did not attempt to prove that there had never been such a thing as agrarian communism; he only aimed at showing that the evidence upon which it has been admitted is totally insufficient. With this object he examined the authorities cited by such writers as Von Maurer, Professor Mommsen, M. Viollet, and M. de Laveleye. The results of that examination appear in the essay now translated. It would be absurd to pronounce confidently between these distinguished disputants without having scrutinised the sources from which they quote. But M. Fustel de Coulanges, it must be confessed, has reopened an enquiry which apparently had been almost concluded. The whole body of evidence as to primitive forms of property in land will have to be reconsidered. It is against Von Maurer and the theory of the mark, that M. de Coulanges points his heaviest battery. He denies that the notices of German usage, which we find in Cæsar and Tacitus, afford any reason for believing in the existence of the mark. Certainly he appears to be correct as against Von Maurer in denying that the word 'ager' in these writers is to be taken as the equivalent of 'ager publicus.' 'Arva per annos mutant' he observes, does not mean 'they annually exchange lands with one another,' but 'they annually shift their cultivated fields to a new part of the territory.' Great inequalities of condition, he insists, distinct classes of nobles, freemen, serfs, and slaves, present themselves in the very earliest periods of German history. The division of the soil, effected at a later period by the German conquerors in the Roman provinces, he plausibly maintains to