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most everywhere integrated into family ownership, which is the first historical form of ownership. "The suggestion may be admissible that at least in some cases family ownership" or the semblance of it, may really be not the origin but the outcome of intestate succession." 1 As the habit of letting alone the strong savage gave him private property, so in turn, the chief's habit of letting alone his family or his favorites in their customary enjoyment of his beneficence creates a status which he finds it easy to let alone. "Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society." The chief was imperceptibly reduced in most cases to an administrative official of the estate which became the unit of society. With Fustel de Coulanges it may be denied that family ownership is "agrarian communism," yet it is certainly more like estate than like private property. If, as Pollock and Maitland say: in co-ownership, the land is owned by individuals, their possession is certainly not the same sort of individual ownership as that which is not in co-ownership. Even the despotic ownership of the Hebrew patriarchs was not an ownership which could. disregard the well being of the inferior person in his family. Although Abraham's "substance was great,' he might have found it difficult to disregard the sustenance of Eliezer of Damascus; for, while Eliezer was the slave of Abraham, he was also his steward, and in the absence of Isaac, he would have been his chief heir, not because Abraham could have willed it so, but because, though he had "great store of servants," they had a customary right to have their relation to the patriarch transmitted to the heir. These slaves, or household retainers, could be transferred, but not to strangers. A man 1 Pollock and Maitland, History of the English Law, vol. ii, p. 247. 2 James, Psychology, vol. i, p. 121.

3 History of the English Law, vol. ii, p. 243.

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might sell his daughter as a concubine, but not to a stranger; while the price of a wife was fifty shekels. A man might even sell himself, but at the end of six years from the beginning of servitude he could "go out free for nothing." 3 If the man liked his master he might have his ear affixed to the door with an awl. But even then the fiftieth or Jubilee year freed the servant from the master's property right. And the patriarch must treat the servant well, not as a bond servant, but as a hired servant and as a sojourner;" he must not "rule over him with rigor." And to his handmaiden, as to his ox and his ass, he must give rest on the sabbath. And although Abraham purchased Sarah for Isaac "with jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment and gave also to her brother and to her mother precious things;" and, although Jacob paid a high price for Rachel and Leah, and Othniel won Achsah, the daughter of Caleb, by his exploits, and David procured thus a daughter of Saul; although the concubines of David descended to his son; although the kinsman had to take the women with the estate, as Boaz purchased Ruth, the Moabitess; yet these women were not regarded as complete chattels, as were women in the preceding social stage.

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The land also was not subject to private ownership. Property could not be private when it was obtained by robbery. Tribes must hold together. Outward conflict compelled an inner unity, which made private property impossible. Wills were unknown, and the land belonged to the Lord, which led to the denunciation of woes upon the remover of ancient land marks. This led Naboth to say to Ahab: "The Lord forbid it me that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee."7 Transfer was difficult

1 Exodus 21: 7.

4 Genesis 24: 53. I Kings 21: 3.

2 Deuteronomy 22: 29.
II Samuel 16: 21.

3 Exodus 21: 2.

6 Ruth 4: 10.

and transient. Symbolic acts were necessary, as the giving of the shoe. There were, moreover, restraints on the enjoyment of the property, chief of which was the Levites' tithe. The owners were forbidden to reap the whole field; while the rich were required to feast all their poor neighbors once a year.

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The foundation of Indian social order also was the family. The law regarded the family as a corporation. The son and the daughter could be sold. Under the caste system, the asura was bound to serve the other classes and the slavery was less harsh than that of Rome. As to land, after the passing of the early village community there remained family ownership, with an elaborate inheritance, with participation of the heirs rather than division. Property was the means of paying a man's funeral expenses. Inheriting the land was inheriting a family and funeral rites. "The right of pronouncing the prayers belongs to the son who came into the world first." "He ought therefore, to have all." 3

After the legendary golden age of communism among the Greeks patriarchal ownership arose. Fustel de Coulanges says that every pos (lot) remained attached to the same family down to the revolution of Cleomenes, i. e., for eight centuries. This can scarcely be recognized as private property, one of the chief characteristics of which is assumed to be the right of disposition. Land was "the property not merely of a man but of a family, whose different members must be born and die here." It was universally prescribed that it might not be sold. Thus Solon punished the sale of land by fine and the loss of citizenship. Aristotle says that many cities forbade sales. Demosthenes got

1 Leviticus 19: 9-10. 3 Manu, ix: 105-7.

2 Hunter, Roman Law, p. 49.

4 Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, p. 63.

all of the patrimony as head of the family. Liberty of private property scarcely existed where entire classes not slaves were excluded from the soil as in Syracuse, Miletus and Samos where the Geomori owned the territory to the exclusion of the Demiurgi.1 In Rome also the chief ownership of the family property was an office, rather than a mere kinship. This was scarcely a régime of private property when only the pater-familias could have any rights approaching private property. The family, not the individual, was sacred. The spirit of patriarchal property spoke in Plato's Laws. The legislator says to the dying: "Thou art the master neither of thy property nor of thyself: thou and thy estate, all these things belong to thy family: that is to say to thy ancestors and to thy posterity."

In Egypt civilization seems to be found in a period passing out of complete family ownership, of which there are survivals, into a caste ownership-like its pyramids, long enduring, with a servile mass at the bottom. There could be no real private ownership in such a civilization, where property in land was mummified, divided among slaves, one-third to the priests, one-third to the royal family, one-third to the warriors; and the mass of the people could have no property at all where an artisan was "more miserable than a woman." In ancient Mexico there was a caste ownership like that of ancient Egypt. The land and the slaves were not salable. The soil was allotted in fiefs, and divided, one-third to the crown, one-third to the nobility and one-third to the temples and tribes, and handed down from age to age from father to son. No Aztec could call a foot of ground his own.* In Peru the people were

1 Fustel de Coulanges, Ancient City, p. 301.

3 Letourneau, op. cit., p. 149.

4 Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 203.

2 Laws, bk. xi.

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divided into classes and sections, each with its chief. third of the land belonged to the sun, one-third to the Incas and one-third to the people, who tilled it all.

So from the Javanese dessa and the Abyssynian family estate to the Russian mir and the communal survivals in Switzerland, Scandinavia and the Orkneys are found evidences of the general prevalence of forms of property that must be called estate rather than private property. It is not characteristic of private property that custom regulate the allotments of land and the rotation of crops. No such liberty was wanted when the Germans were themselves in rotation and "agriculturae minime student," and wanted only oatmeal and game and security. When war was always imminent, unity, "integration," was more desirable than private property. Then they were "beerbten." Neither money, nor scarcity of land existed to make it worth while to rob them of their inheritance. They had not learned the word "Eigenthum."

If the foregoing conclusions be true, barbarian society everywhere passed through an alternation of private property and estate.

Barbarian estate faded into a more individualized ownership as the barbarian society gave place to national unity. "The agents of legal chance, Fictions, Equity and Legislation, are brought in turn to bear on the primeval institutions and at every point of the progress, a greater number of personal rights and a larger amount of property are removed from the domestic forum to the cognizance of the public tribunals." The establishment of the Hebrew monarchy, with the subsequent development of national unity, such as appointment of judges by Jehosaphat, diminished

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1 Letourneau, op. cit., p. 157.
2 Maine, Ancient Laws, p. 162.

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