turf, fishing or estovers, cutting timber and furze, franchises, advowsons, tithes, annuities, sporting rights, watercourses, lights, rights of support-all rights which limit ownership for individual and social benefit in the land to which they are attached. The Statute of Limitations shows the nature of ownership as a social institution. A man may not "sleep upon his rights" and then dispossess the actual possessor. No entry, distress or action shall be brought to recover any land or rent, but within twelve years after the right to bring the same shall have accrued to the person seeking to enforce it. New rights of tenants have been developed by recent efforts to ameliorate their condition. By the Agricultural Holdings Acts (1851-1883) the tenant's improvements on the property are secured to him. The Allotment Acts of 1887 and 1894 also allow local authorities to buy land by agreement, if possible, or by authority, if necessary, to sublet to small tenants. The policy

of enclosing commons has been reversed since 1865.

Measures have been taken to relieve the oppression wrought upon the Irish by private property in land. Of the various legislative enactments dealing with Ireland between the years 1816 and 1842, no fewer than thirty-two were in favor of the landlord while legislation entirely neglected the tenant. The idea of absolute ownership prevailed in the government's dealings with land, in the twenty years. after 1845. It was sought to compensate the tenant for starvation, disease, and "clearances" by consolidating farmers, and to discourage his habit of shooting landlords, without disturbing the absolute property right of the owners. A commission proposed to determine what compensation should be given the tenant for work was killed by the cry

1 Taswell-Langmead, op. cit., p. 641.

2 See Dunning, W. A., Political Science Quarterly, vol. 7, p. 504 et seq.

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of confiscation." The next twenty years secured legal recognition of the tenant's right. Gladstone's Landlord and Tenant Act (1870) secured property rights for tenants, fixed tenure and compensation for eviction. The landlord's right to demand any rent he pleased was not yet disturbed. In more recent years efforts have been made to turn the tenant into a proprietor. The Land Law of 1887 secured the free sale of tenant rights, a secure term of fifteen years, renewable forever and fixed rent during a term on condition of due payment, no waste and no subletting. Then there was judicial reduction of rents from 1881 to 1886 of 18.2 per cent. Compulsory expropriation of land has more recently been resorted to. By the Ashbourn Acts (1885-7) the whole amount of the purchase price was advanced to the tenant with repayment in forty-nine years, interest 4 per cent. By the law of 1903 $500,000,000 was to be loaned to Irish farmers at 314 per cent.

Limitation of the use of industrial privileges has been so continuous that it is not possible to fix any beginning of the increasing limitation of the present. The personality of the servant, the chief resource of industrial ownership, has been recognized in many ways. Before the doctrine of free contract became supreme in English political philosophy, legislation in behalf of labor was already developing. In 1802 the first child labor law was passed. "From this humble beginning the protection of the state was gradually extended to "young people," to the textile industries (1833); to women (1844); then to all large industries (1854) then to the smaller workshops generally (1867) and finally blossomed out into full fledged factory acts regulating industry generally in behalf of the health and safety of the laboring population. Under the individualism of the strong, labor unions of the weak inevitably gained in strength and struggled for the vestiges of status

against the insecurity of an age of contract. The necessity for doing something about the distress of labor led to the repeal of the statutes against combinations, thus giving some legal status to the influence of labor unions.

The individual liberty made possible by political unity reacted on that unity with measures of equality, such as the Habeas Corpus Act, right of petition, destruction of governmental absolutism, the ascendency of the House of Commons after ages of struggle with autocracy. As unity became absolute, absolutism became corporate. Under this diffused unity, economic liberty grew. The new centralization perhaps presages some new and better adjusted ownership, private property shorn of some of its anti-social power, possibly the national middle class hereditary estates suggested by Gneist.1

1 Quoted by Taswell-Langmead, op. cit., p. 643.

CHAPTER V

LIBERTY TO OWN SLAVES IN AMERICA

2

1

LIBERTY of ownership, private property, in America as in England was greatest with the completion and democratization of political unity under the influence of the sentiment best expressed by John Woolman: "I believe that liberty is the natural right of all men equally." It is unnecessary to detail the establishment of the constitution and of universal suffrage, a political privilege essential to liberty of ownership. Franklin said to those who have no landed property," the allowing them to vote for legislators is an impropriety." Hamilton said: "Those who have no property have no will of their own." 2 Calhoun said: "There has never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not in point of fact live on the labor of the other." " They but repeated Plato and Aristotle, who thought virtue (ability) impossible without leisure. Hence those who labor to live are not fit to govern. Lincoln modernized this sentiment : "A Yankee who could invent a strong handed man without a head would receive the everlasting gratitude of the mudstill advocates." However unreal the right of property may be to the propertyless, its nominal concession to all men was completed by the grant of civil and political rights to "the

1 Sermon, p. 9. 3 Ibid., p. 239.

2 Merriam, American Political Theories, p. 84.

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strong handed man without a head." When however this point had been reached, the extension of the suffrage ceased to be a guarantee of private property of the completest form and became a restriction. The extension of liberty is its own restriction.

1

Although private property in slaves had not come to be held immutable before its national guarantee yet it had long been a virtual right of Englishmen in America. It was found chiefly in the south, since in the north as in England, the limitations of nature made possible the appropriation of the services without the appropriation of the servant. Goldwin Smith says: "The sole source of slavery was in the desire of Europeans in a languid climate to have the work done for them instead of doing it themselves." George Washington complained that the farmers actually had to work beside their servants to make a profit. An English slave agent in Georgia said: "It is as clear as light itself that negroes are as essentially necessary to the cultivation of Georgia as axes, hoes or any other utensil of agriculture." Had not the Dutch sailed up the James with African creatures capable of domestication, it is probable that the incipient form of slavery known as indenture might have become a system of slavery, by the use of penalties and other devices for extending the time of indenture, such as were already in use. Indeed the first colonists were themselves the victims of the rapacity of the London Company. Dreaming of gold they found chains, marching to their daily work in squads under the lash and subject to penal servitude for petty offences. In 1619 one hundred poor boys and girls were taken from

2

1 The United States, p. 221.

2 Burghardt-DuBois, Slave Trade, p. 8.

3 Ballagh, White Servitude in Virginia, pp. 24-6.

3