Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/801

in Landed Property." And I select M. de Laveleye as a witness the more willingly, because lie draws very different conclusions from the facts he so carefully adduces to those which they appear to me to support.

After enumerating various countries in which, as M. de Laveleye thinks, inequality and an aristocracy were the result of conquest, he asks very pertinently:

But how were they developed in such countries as Germany, which know nothing of conquerors coming to create a privileged caste above a vanquished and enslaved population? Originally we see in Germany associations of free and independent peasants like the inhabitants of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden at the present day. At the close of the middle ages we find, in the same country, a feudal aristocracy resting more heavily on the soil, and a rustic population more completely enslaved than in England, Italy, or France (p. 222).

The author proceeds to answer the question which he propounds by showing, in the first place, that the admission of the right of individuals and their heirs to the land they had reclaimed, which was so general, if not universal, created hereditary individual property alongside the communal property, so that private estates arose in the waste between the sparse communal estates. Now, it was not every family or member of a community that was enterprising enough to go out and clear waste lands, or that had the courage to defend its possessions when once obtained. The originally small size of the domains thus acquired, and the strong stimulus of personal interest, led to the introduction of better methods of cultivation than those traditional in the communes. And, finally, as the private owner got little or no benefit from the community, he was exempted from the charges and corvées laid upon its members. The result, as may be imagined, was that the private proprietors, aided by serflabor, prospered more than the communities cultivated by their free members, seriously hampered them by occupying fresh waste lands, yielded more produce, and furnished wealth, which, with the help of the majorat system, remained concentrated in the hands of owners who, in virtue of their possessions, could maintain retainers; while, freed from the need to labor, they could occupy themselves with war and the chase, and, as nobles, attend the sovereign. On the other hand, their brethren, left behind in the communes, had little chance of growing individually rich or powerful, and had to give themselves up to agricultural toil. The Bishop of Oxford, in his well-known "Constitutional History of England" (vol. i, p. 51), puts the case, as his wont is, concisely and precisely: "As the population increased, and agriculture itself improved, the mark system must have been superseded everywhere." No doubt, when the nobles had once established themselves, they often added force and fraud to their other means