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.