He sympathizes with the equality of fortunes maintained in early society, but his counsels to modern society are based on the dangers that threaten it from enormous inequality of property in an age in which all men are becoming equal in political power, and sovereignty is passing into the hands of those who possess least, because they are the most numerous. Nor can it be denied that the unequal distribution of landed property in the British Islands especially, has been the result, in no small degree, not of social development or natural evolution in that sense, but of violence and usurpation in past times, and the maintenance down to our own time of a system of law derived from them.
The fact that Sir H. Maine and M. de Laveleye look with different eyes on the primitive usages of society is easily intelligible. The tendency of agriculture, commerce, and invention, of the development alike of human wants and aspirations, and of human faculties, is not only towards individual property, but towards inequality of property; and for my own part I see no greater injustice in unequal riches than in unequal strength or intellectual power. But the actual inequalities of fortune, and of landed property especially, have sprung also from other very different causes which M. de Laveleye describes. The result of the combined operation of both sets of causes is that where Sir H. Maine sees progress and civilization, M. de Laveleye sees formidable dangers to society. The owners of property are on the eve of becoming a powerless minority, and the many, to whom the whole power of the State is of necessity gravitating, see all the means of subsistence and enjoyment afforded by Nature in the possession of the few.
Readers who incline more to Sir H. Maine's point of view may therefore find much to concur with in some of M. de Laveleye's practical conclusions.
The course of English legislation with respect to commons, for example, would, one may safely assert, have been materially different had M. de Laveleye's book been published two generations ago; and even now it may not be without influence on the side of those who resist further usurpation under the cloak of improvement; the pretext urged from the days of Henry III when the statute of Merton was passed, to those of Victoria. The subject, again, has a practical importance in relation to two opposite typos of society, represented on a great scale within the limits of the British empire; namely, ancient communities like those inhabiting India, and new communities at the beginning of their career, like those of Australia and New Zealand. As regards the first, it cannot be doubted that a knowledge of the early forms of land ownership would have preserved English administration from some of the worst blunders ever committed in the history of the government of dependencies. In the case of young colonies, on the other hand, it is no invasion of the principles on which individual property properly rests, to concede to writers like M. de Laveleye and Mr Pearson, (5) that a few score of the first comers into an immense territory ought not to be suffered to engross to themselves and their defendants the greater part of the land.
Great changes in English ideas with respect to the devolution and distribution of landed property will doubtless follow sooner or later a great change in the distribution of political power. The history of political ideas is the history of change; and the ideas of the dominant classes become the dominant ideas in politics. No right is now held more sacred in England than the right of unrestricted bequest; and the same sentiment supports the right of settlement and entail; both are regarded here as natural rights, although at the other side of the English Channel the prevailing opinion is that a child has an indefeasible right to a share of the property of his parents. Both conceptions are of historical origin; the first is the one that we find in the early code of the Twelve Tables, the second has come down from the code of Justinian. "In France," says Sir Henry Maine, "the change which took place at the first Revolution was this: the land law of the people superseded the land law of the nobles. In England the converse process has been gone through; the system of the nobles has become in all essential particulars the system of the people." (6) When the people shall have the dominion in England, what shall become of the system of the nobles?
There is no path of historical research that does not load to some practical conclusions, but some of its paths end as it were in cross roads, going different ways, between which the choice may be difficult. It is however one great advantage of the historical method that it has attractions and instruction apart from the practical inferences of particular authors.
The historical part of Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy, for example, may be studied with profound admiration by readers who wholly repudiate his system of polity. In like manner M. de Laveleye's work on primitive property cannot be read without interest and benefit even by those who most firmly refuse to accept some of the doctrines that it upholds.
T.E.C LESLIE
November 30, 1877.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
The present work professes to be nothing but a mere translation of M.
do Laveleye's treatise "De la propriété et de ses formes primitives," and I have therefore confined myself strictly to a ****** reproduction of the author's text, without comment or alteration. These pages will, however, be found to differ considerably from the original French edition of 1874, both in arrangement and contents; as by the courtesy of the author I am able to present the work to the English public in the form in which it is about to appear in the new French edition.
G.R.L. MARRIOTT.
Cambridge, December, 1877.
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION
