Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/775

 REVIEWS 753 have been a division made once for all and giving rise to full private property. Coming down to a still later period, which affords the collections of laws and of charters quoted by Von Maurer as establish- ing the existence of the mark, M. de Coulanges complains that Von Maurer has ignored the far more copious proof which they afford of .the existence of private property in land. M. de Coulanges cites many passages to show that in these records the term mark is used merely to signify a boundary or the land included within a boundary. In these records the gift, sale, and devise, of lands, are fully r. ecognised. The references to common forest, or to common pasture, on examination, testify to nothing more than such cases of joint ownership by two or three persons, as may be found in all ages, or to common enjoyment by the serfs or tenants of a lord who owned both the arable and the waste land. In dismissing Von Maurer, M. de Coulanges sums up as follows: ' Go over the innumerable quotati. ons at the bottom of the pages of his book: more than two-thirds relate to private property;of the rest, some hundreds are concerned with minor points unconnected with the subject; not a single one touches the main question, or if there are any which at first sight appear to do so, the slightest examination shows that they have been misunderstood and misinterpreted' (p. 61). M. Viollet and M. de Laveleye, in so far as they build upon Greek or Roman authorities are still more severely handled. M. de Coulanges rightly treats the inference from the poetical age of gold to primitive communism in land as unwarrantable euhemerism, the vain attempt to distil history from mythology. Moreover, as he remarks, the age of gold is always represented as an age, not of cultivation, but of idleness; an age of spontaneous plenty in which every one had more than enough, and no property, whether collective or individual, could arise. The more historical authorities quoted in fayour of collective ownership of land by the primitive Greeks or Italians, he shows to be equally insuffi- cient. The common meals of Sparta were not furnished out of the produce of common land, since we know that common meals were introduced into Sparta at a time when private property had already been established, and that, as time went on, many Spartans were excluded from the common meals because they were too poor to make any contribution. The communism recommended by Plato, and established by Pythagoras, was clearly exceptional, a philosophic freak at variance with the universal habits of Greek life. The restrictions upon sale or devise of land so frequent in early Greek law, were intended to protect the rights of the family, not of the community, which would not have suffered by one citizen transferring to another his interest in the common land. Finally the bulk of the evidence adduced in favour of Greek agrarian communism is ludicrously small when we consider how much evidence can be adduced on the other side. 'Ever authority ought to be consulted, the whole of Greek literature ought to be studied, in treating of such a problem as M. Viollet's' (p. 95). ' Alike NO. 4..-VOL. I 3 C