ownership, qualified by State-suzerainty. . . The land can of course be 'resumed' on payment of full compensation, and managed by the 'people' if they so will it."

And the badness of the required system of administration is the only reason urged for maintaining the existing system of land-holding: the supreme ownership of the community being avowedly recognized. So that whereas, in early stages, along with the freedom of each man, there went joint ownership of the soil by the body of men; and whereas, during the long periods of that militant activity by which small communities were consolidated into great ones, there simultaneously resulted loss of individual freedom and loss of participation in land-ownership; there has, with the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism, been a re-acquirement of individual freedom and a re-acquirement of such participation in land-ownership as is implied by a share in appointing the body by which the land is now held. And the implication is that the members of the community, habitually exercising as they do, through their representatives, the power of alienating and using as they think well, any portion of the land, may equitably appropriate and use, if they think fit, all portions of the land. But since equity and daily custom alike imply that existing holders of particular portions of land, may not be dispossessed without giving them in return its fairlyestimated value, it is also implied that the wholesale resumption of the land by the community can be justly effected only by wholesale purchase of it. Were the direct exercise of ownership to be resumed by the community without purchase, the community would take, along with something which is its own, an immensely greater amount of something which is not its own. Even if we ignore those multitudinous complications which, in the course of century after century, have inextricably entangled men's claims, theoretically considered—even if we reduce the case to its simplest theoretical form ; must admit that all which can be claimed for the community

we

is the surface of the country in its original unsubdued state. To all that value given to it by clearing, breaking-up, prolonged culture, fencing, draining, making roads, farm buildings, &c., constituting nearly all its value, the community has no claim. This value has been given either by personal labour, or by labour paid for, or by ancestral labour; or else the value given to it in such ways has been purchased by legitimately earned money. All this value artificially given vests in existing owners, and cannot without a gigantic robbery be taken from them. If, during the many transactions which have brought about existing land-ownership, there have been much violence and much fraud, these have been small compared with the violence and the fraud which the community would be guilty of did it take possession, without paying for it, of that artificial value which the labour of nearly two thousand years has given to the land.

§ 53. Reverting to the general topic of the chapterthe rights to the uses of natural media—it chiefly concerns us here to note the way in which these rights have gradually acquired legislative sanctions as societies have advanced to higher types.

At the beginning of the chapter we saw that in modern times there have arisen legal assertions of men's equal rights to the uses of light and air: no forms of social organization or class-interests having appreciably hindered recognition of these corollaries from the law of equal freedom. And we have just seen that by implication, if not in any overt or conscious way, there has in our days been recognized the equal rights of all electors to supreme. ownership of the inhabited area-rights which, though latent, are asserted by every Act of Parliament which alienates land. Though this right to the use of the Earth, possessed by each citizen, is traversed by established arrangements to so great an extent as to be practically

suspended; yet its existence as an equitable claim cannot be denied without affirming that expropriation by Statedecree is inequitable. The right of an existing holder of land can be equitably superseded, only if there exists a prior right of the community at large; and this prior right of the community at large consists of the sum of the individual rights of its members.

NOTE.

Various considerations touching this vexed question of land-ownership, which would occupy too much space if included here, I have included in Appendix B.

CHAPTER XII.

THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.

§ 54. Since all material objects capable of being owned, are in one way or other obtained from the Earth, it results that the right of property is originally dependent on the right to the use of the Earth. While there were yet no artificial products, and natural products were therefore the only things which could be appropriated, this was an obviously necessary connexion. And though, in our developed form of society, there are multitudinous possessions, ranging from houses, furniture, clothes, works of art, to bank-notes, railway-shares, mortgages, government bonds, &c., the origins of which have no manifest relation to use of the Earth; yet it needs but to remember that they either are, or represent, products of labour, that labour is made possible by food, and that food is obtained from the soil, to see that the connexion, though remote and entangled, still continues. Whence it follows that a complete ethical justification for the right of property, is involved in the same difficulties as the ethical justification for the right to the use of the Earth.

"

The justification attempted by Locke is unsatisfactory. Saying that though the Earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person," and inferring that "the labour of his body, and the work of his hands," are therefore his, he continues :-"Whatever then he removes out of the state

that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." But one might reply that as, according to the premises, "the Earth and all inferior creatures are common to all men," the consent of all men must be obtained before any article can be equitably " removed from the common state nature hath placed it in." The question at issue is, whether by labour expended in removing it, a man has made his right to the thing greater than the pre-existing rights of all other men put together. The difficulty thus arising may be avoided however. There are three ways in which, under savage, semi-civilized, and civilized conditions, men's several rights of property may be established with due regard to the equal rights of all other men.

Among the occupiers of a tract who gather or catch the wild products around, it may be tacitly, if not overtly, agreed that having equal opportunities of utilizing such products, appropriation achieved by any one shall be passively assented to by the others. This is the general understanding acted upon by the members of hunting tribes. It is instructive to observe, however, that among some of them there is practically, if not theoretically, asserted the qualification indicated above; for usage countenances a partial claim by other tribes-men to game which one of the tribe has killed: apparently implying the belief that this prey was in part theirs before it was killed. Schoolcraft tells us concerning the Comanches that—

They recognize no distinct rights of meum and tuum, except to personal property; holding the territory they occupy, and the game that depastures upon it, as common to all the tribe: the latter is appropriated only by capture. He who kills the game retains the skin, and the meat is divided according to the necessity of the party, always without contention, as each individual shares his food with every member of the tribe." Kindred usages and ideas are found among the Chippewayans. Schoolcraft writes :

"In the former instance [when game is taken in inclosures by a hunting