Page:The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.djvu/176

170 communistic group, or whether all three of these groups existed at the same time as a result of different local conditions, may remain undecided for a long while yet Kovalevsky maintains that the conditions described by Tacitus were not founded on the mark or village community, but on the household community, which developed much later into the village community by the growth of the population.

Hence the settlements of the Germans on the territory they occupied at the time of the Romans, and on territory later taken by them from the Romans, would not have consisted of villages, but of large co-operative families comprising several generations, who cultivated a sufficient piece of land and used the surrounding wild land in common with their neighbors. If this was the case, then the passage in Tacitus regarding the changing of the cultivated land would indeed have an agronomic meaning, viz., that the co-operative household cultivated a different piece of land every year, and the land cultivated during the previous year was left untilled or entirely abandoned. The scarcity of the population would have left enough spare wild lands to make all dispute about land unnecessary. Only after the lapse of centuries, when the members of the family had increased so that the collective cultivation became incompatible with the prevailing conditions of production, the household communities were dissolved. The former common fields and meadows were then divided in the well-known manner among the various individual families that had now formed. The division of farm lands was first periodical, but later final, while forest, pasture and watercourses remained common property.

It seems that this process of development has been fully established for Russia by historical investigation. As for Germany and, in the second place, for