LANDOWNERSHIP IN HISTORY
Thirty or thirty-five years ago, the majority of economic historians
seemed to accept the theory that land was originally owned in
common.[1] They held that in the beginning the community, usually a
village community, was the landowner; that the community either
cultivated the land as a corporation, and distributed the product
among the individual members, or periodically divided the land among
the social units, and permitted the latter to cultivate their
allotments separately. The second of these forms of tenure was the
more general. The primitive time to which the theory referred was not
the period when men got their living by hunting and fishing, or by
rearing herds, but the agricultural stage of economic development,
when life had become settled. Of the arguments upon which the theory
was based, some consisted of ambiguous statements by ancient writers,
such as Plato, Cæsar, and Tacitus, and others were merely inferences
drawn from the existence of certain agrarian institutions: family
ownership of land; common pasture lands and woodlands; periodical
distribution of land among the cultivators, as in the German Mark, the
Russian Mir, the Slavonic Zadruga, and the Javanese Dessa. All these
practices have been interpreted as "survivals" of primitive common
ownership. Only on this hypothesis, it is argued, can they be
satisfactorily explained.
More recent writers have subjected the various arguments for this
theory to a searching criticism.[2] To-day the great majority of
scholars would undoubtedly accept the conclusion of Fustel de
Coulanges, that the arguments and evidence are not sufficient to prove
that in the earliest stages of agricultural life land was held in
common; and a majority would probably take the more positive ground
that common ownership in the sense of communal cultivation and
distribution, never existed for any considerable length of time among
any agricultural people. The present authoritative opinion on the
subject is thus summarized by Professor Ashley:
"From the earliest historical times, in Gaul and Germany, very much
land was owned individually, and wealth on one side and slavery on the
other were always very important factors in the situation.
"Even in Germany, communal ownership of land was never a fundamental
or generally pervasive social institution; there was something very
much like large private estates, worked by dependents and slaves, from
the very earliest days of Teutonic Settlement.
"As to England, it is highly probable that we shall not find anything
that can fairly be called a general communal system of landowning,
combined with a substantial equality among the majority of the people,
under conditions of settled agriculture. To find it in any sense we
shall have to go back to an earlier and 'tribal' condition, if,
indeed, we shall find it there!"[3]
_No Private Ownership in Pre-Agricultural Conditions_
Whenever and wherever men got their living by hunting and fishing,
there was no inducement to own land privately, except possibly those
portions upon which they built their huts or houses. "Until they
become more or less an agricultural people they are usually hunters or
fishermen or both, and possibly also to a limited extent keepers of
sheep and cattle. Population is then sparse and unoccupied territory
is plentiful, and questions of the ownership of particular tracts of
land do not concern them."[4] In any region occupied by a group or
tribe, all portions of the land and the water were about equally
productive of game and fish; the amount obtainable by any individual
had no relation to labour on any particular piece of soil; and it was
much easier for each to range over the whole region in common with his
fellows than to mark off a definite section upon which he would not
permit others to come, but beyond which he himself would not be
permitted to go. In such conditions private ownership of land would
have been folly. Tribal or group ownership was, however, in vogue,
especially among those groups that were in control of the better
grounds or streams. Even this form of proprietorship was comparatively
unstable, since the people were to a considerable degree nomadic, and
were willing to abandon present possessions whenever there was a
prospect of obtaining better ones elsewhere. Among men who got their
living by rearing herds, the inducement to hold land in exclusive
private control would be somewhat stronger. The better grazing tracts
would be coveted by many different persons, especially in the more
populous communities. And there would always be the possibility of
confusion among the different herds, and contention among their
owners. In such circumstances the advantages of exclusive control
would sometimes outweigh the benefits of common use and ownership. In
the thirteenth chapter of Genesis we are told that, owing to strife
between the herdsmen of Abram and Lot, the brothers separated, and
agreed to become the exclusive possessors of different territories.
Nevertheless, it is probable that tribal ownership was the prevailing
form of land tenure so long as people remained mainly in pastoral
conditions.
It is likewise probable that the same system continued in many cases
for some time after men began to cultivate the soil. At least, this
would seem to have been the natural arrangement while land was
plentiful, and the methods of cultivation crude and soil-exhausting.
It would be more profitable to take up new lands than to continue upon
the old. Within historical times this system prevailed among the
ancient Germans, some of the tribes of New Zealand, and some of the
tribes of Western Africa. Where land was not so plentiful it was
sometimes redistributed among individuals or heads of families, as
often as a death occurred or a new member arrived in the community.
Some of the tribes and peoples who observed this practice were the
ancient Irish, the aborigines of Peru, Mexico, and parts of what is
now the United States, and Australia, and some of the tribes of
Africa, India, and Malaysia.[5] Whether the most primitive
agricultural systems of every people were of this nature we have, of
course, no means of knowing, but the supposition is antecedently
probable; for agriculture must have begun very gradually, and been for
some time practised in connection with the more primitive methods of
obtaining a livelihood. As the land had been held for the most part in
common during the hunting and fishing stage and during the pastoral
stage, the same arrangement would probably continue until the people
found it necessary to cultivate the same tracts of land year after
year, and conceived the desire to retain their holdings in stable
possession and to transmit them to their children. Moreover, so long
as the members of the clan remained strongly conscious of their
kinship, and realised the necessity of acting as a unit against their
enemies, there would be a strong incentive to clan ownership of the
land, and clan allotment of it among the individual members. In other
words, the clan would, in these circumstances, have the same motives
for common ownership that exist to-day in the family.
The oldest historical peoples, the Israelites, Egyptians, Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Chinese, had private ownership of land at the
beginning of their recorded history. Most of them, however, had been
cultivating land for a considerable length of time, and had acquired a
considerable degree of civilisation, before the earliest period of
their existence of which we have any knowledge. It is quite possible
that those among them that had passed through the hunting and fishing
or the pastoral stage of existence, had practised tribal or common
ownership during the earlier portion of their agricultural life.
_How the Change Probably Took Place_
The change from tribal to private landownership could have occurred in
a great variety of ways. For example, the chief, patriarch, or king
might have gradually obtained greater authority in making the
allotments of land among the members of the tribe or group, and thus
acquired a degree of control over the land which in time became
practical ownership; he might have seized the holdings of deceased
persons, or of those who were unable to pay him the tax or tribute
that he demanded, or of those who were for any reason obnoxious to
him. Again, the taxes paid to the chief man in a community for his
services as ruler might have come in time to be regarded as a payment
for the use of the land, and therefore as an acknowledgment that the
chief was also the landlord. Even in the Middle Ages the rents
received by the feudal lords were in great measure a return for social
and political services, just as are the taxes received to-day from
private landowners by the State. In primitive times, as well as later
on, the chief would naturally do his best to convert this institution
of tax paying or tribute paying into rent paying, and to add the
position of landowner to his other prerogatives. After all, the
transition from tribal ownership, with private cultivation and private
receipt of the produce of individual allotments, to overlordship and
landlordism, would not have been greater than that which actually took
place in England between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries,
when the lords became absolute owners of land that they had previously
held with their tenants in a sort of divided or dual ownership. In a
word, tribal ownership could have been displaced by landlordism
through the same methods that have been used everywhere by the
powerful, the ambitious, and the greedy against the weak, the
indifferent, and the upright. Nor must we forget the influence of
conquest. Most of the countries that appear in historical times with a
system of private ownership had at some previous period been
subjugated by an alien people. In many of these the conquerors
undoubtedly introduced a considerable degree of individual ownership,
the more powerful among them becoming landlords, while their weaker
companions and the mass of the conquered population were established
in a condition of tenancy.
Where a somewhat widely diffused private ownership succeeded the
primitive system, it was probably due to the free action of the
cultivators, as soon as they came to realise the inconveniences of
ownership in common. "Any enclosed land round their permanent
dwellings, and any land outside the settlement which was cleared,
reclaimed, and cultivated, or occupied with cattle by individuals or
families, was recognised as their personal property. Only those who
were industrious, enterprising, and courageous enough would clear,
occupy, retain, cultivate, and defend waste land. They would become
personal owners of cattle, and would gradually acquire wealth which
would enable them to employ others and still further improve their
position. As their power increased, and as population grew, the
bravest, wealthiest, and most capable fighting men amongst them would
become chiefs or a species of nobles, and the force of circumstances,
often no doubt aided by force and fraud, would eventually make them
the landowners of the greater part of the district, with the more or
less willing acquiescence and consent of the community amongst whom
they lived, and to whom they extended their protection."[6]
_Limited Character of Primitive Common Ownership_
A great deal of the opposition to the theory of primitive common
ownership of agricultural land, seems to be based upon an exaggerated
conception of the scope of that institution. The average man who
thinks or speaks of ownership to-day has in mind the Roman concept and
practice of private property. This includes the unrestricted right of
disposal; that is, the power to hold permanently, to transfer or
transmit, to use or to abuse or not to use at all, to retain the
product of the owner's use, to rent the property to any person and for
any period that the owner chooses, and to obtain a price in return
called rent. Any man who takes the theory of primitive common
ownership to imply that the community or tribe exercised all these
powers over its land, will have no difficulty in proving that the
evidence is overwhelmingly against any such theory. Even among those
people that are certainly known to have practised so-called common
ownership of land, there are very few instances of communal
cultivation, or communal distribution of the product. Yet these are
included in the Roman concept of ownership. The usual method seems to
have been periodical allotment by the community of the land among
individuals, individual cultivation of the allotted tracts, and
individual ownership of the product. Moreover, there was always a
chief or patriarch who exercised considerable authority in the
distribution of the land, frequently collected a rent or tax from the
cultivators, and almost invariably exercised something like private
ownership of a portion of the land for his direct and special benefit.
Sometimes other men of importance in the community possessed land
which was not subject to the communal allotment. Primitive ownership
of land in common was, therefore, very far from vesting in the
community all the powers that inhere in the private proprietor of land
according to the Roman law and usage.
_Private Ownership General in Historical Times_
So much for land tenure in prehistoric times. During the historical
period of the existence of the race, almost all civilised peoples have
practised some form of private ownership in the matter of their arable
lands. While differing considerably at various times and places, it
has always excluded communal allotment of land and communal
distribution of the product, and has always included private receipt
of the product by the owner-user, or private receipt of rent when the
owner transferred the use to some one else. But it did not always
include the right to determine who should be the user. In the later
centuries of the feudal system, for example, the lord could not always
expel the tenants from the land, nor prevent them from transmitting
the use of it to their children. Moreover, the rent that he received
was customary and fixed, not competitive and arbitrary, and it was
looked upon in great measure as a return to the lord for social,
military, and political services, as well as a payment for the use of
land. This system was private ownership, indeed, but if we apply the
Roman notion of ownership we shall find it difficult to decide whether
the tenant or the lord should more properly be called the owner. At
any rate, the right of ownership possessed by the lord was greatly
limited by restrictions which favoured the masses of the cultivators.
In every community there were common wood lands and pasture lands for
the free use of all the inhabitants. Among other restrictions of
private ownership and control in favour of the principle of equal
access to the land by all persons, we may mention the division of the
English villein's holding into several portions, intermingled with
those of his neighbours, so that each would have about the same amount
of good land; and the ancient Hebrew law whereby alienated land was
returned to the descendants of its original owners every fifty
years.[7]
Reckoning the feudal lord, and all other overlords who had the same
control over land, as private proprietors, we may say that in
historical times the arable land of every country has been owned by a
minority of the population. Since the downfall of feudalism, the
tendency in most regions of the Western world has been toward an
increase in the number of owners, and a decrease in the number of
great estates. This tendency has been especially marked during the
last one hundred years. It will, however, need to continue for a very
long time, or else to increase its pace very rapidly, before land
ownership will be diffused in anything like the measure that is
necessary if its benefits are to be shared by all the people. Even in
the United States, where the distribution is perhaps more general than
in any other country, only 38.4 per cent. of the families in towns and
cities owned, in 1910, the homes in which they lived, and therefore
the land upon which their homes were located. In the rural districts
the per cent. of home-owning families was only 62.8.
_Conclusions from History_
What conclusions does history warrant concerning the social and moral
value of private landownership? Here we are on very uncertain ground;
for different inferences may be drawn from the same group of facts if
a different section of them be selected for emphasis. Sir Henry Maine
and Henry George both accepted the theory of primitive agrarian
communism, but the former saw in this assumed fact a proof that common
ownership was suited only to the needs of rude and undeveloped
peoples, while the latter regarded it as a sure indication that common
ownership was fundamentally natural and in accordance with permanent
social welfare. The fact that practically all peoples whose history we
know discarded communal for private ownership as soon as they had
acquired a moderate degree of proficiency in methods of cultivation
and in the arts of civilised life does, indeed, create a presumption
that the latter system is the better for civilised men. To this extent
Sir Henry Maine is right. Against this presumption Henry George
maintained that common ownership was abandoned solely because of the
usurpation, fraud, and force employed by the powerful and privileged
classes. Undoubtedly this factor played a great part in bringing about
the private ownership that has existed and still exists, but it does
not account for the institution as a whole and everywhere. If chiefs,
kings, and other powerful personages had never usurped control of the
land, if no people had ever conquered the territory of another, it is
probable that private ownership would have taken place to the same
extent, although it would have been much more widely diffused. For the
system of periodical repartition of land, to say nothing of communal
cultivation and communal distribution of the product, does hinder that
attachment to a particular portion of the soil and that intensive
cultivation which are so necessary to the best interests of the
cultivator, the most productive use of the land, and therefore the
welfare of society.
On the other hand, the limitations on the right of private ownership
which have been established in so many places and times in favour of
those who were not owners, show that men have very generally looked
upon land as in some measure the inheritance of all the people. Hence
arises the presumption that this conviction is but the reflection of
fundamental and permanent human needs.
Summing up the matter, we may say that the history of land tenure
points on the whole to the conclusion that private ownership is
socially and individually preferable to agrarian communism, but that
it should be somewhat strictly limited in the interest of the
non-owners, and of the community as a whole.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The most notable exponents of this view were: Von Maurer,
"Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark," 1854; Viollet, "Bibliotheque de
l'école des chartres," 1872; Maine, "Village Communities in the East
and the West," 1872; and De Laveleye, "De la propriété et ses formes
primitives," 1874, of which an English translation appeared in 1878
under the title, "Primitive Property."
[2] Chief among these writers are: Fustel de Coulanges in an article
in "Revue des Questions Historiques," April, 1889; translated by
Margaret Ashley, and published with an introductory chapter by W. J.
Ashley under the title, "The Origin of Property in Land," 1891; G. Von
Below, "Beilage zur Allgemeine Zeitung: Das kurze Leben einer
vielgenannten Theorie," 1903; F. Seebohm, "The Village Community,"
1883. Cf. Whittaker, "Ownership, Tenure, and Taxation of Land," 1914,
ch. ii; Cathrein, "Das Privatgrundeigenthum und seine Gegner," 1909;
and Pesch, "Lehrbuch der Nationaloekonomie," I, 183-188.
[3] Quoted in Whittaker, op. cit., pp. 27, 28.
[4] Idem, p. 29.
[5] Cf. P. W. Joyce, "A Social History of Ancient Ireland," 1903; and
Letourneau, "Property: Its Origin and Development," 1896.
[6] Whittaker, op. cit., pp. 30, 31.
[7] Leviticus xxv, 23-28.