Watson's Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 2, April, 1906

by Various

Thus by slow and almost imperceptible degrees, the tribe recognized, first, the right of the man who had made a farm to hold it as long as he lived; second, the right of his children to follow in his footsteps and to receive the benefit of that which their father had created by his labor; third, and last, came the law of wills and testaments which allowed the tribesman to say what should go with his property after his death.

If the occupant died without heirs and without having made a will, the land went back to the tribe, or the state, to be disposed of as public property. This principle is recognized to this day in the doctrine of escheats.

Property in land differs in nowise from property in horses and cows. The law of property is the same naturally in real estate as in personal estate, and I can conceive of no revenue in any community which is so just as that which lays itself with an equal burden upon all kinds of property in proportion to the amount thereof. In the beginning, one tribesman, like Abraham or Lot, might have his cattle browsing upon a thousand hills, while another tribesman might have made a little farm in some secluded valley, or upon some thirsty, rocky mountain-side where vines were planted, or where olive trees bore their fruit to the industrious citizen who had year in and year out watched and tended their growth. Would there be any justice in compelling those little farmers to supply the revenue for the common purpose of the tribe, and not compel a contribution pro rata from the men who owned “exceeding many flocks and herds”?

The trouble about these doctrinaires is that they start at the present day and reason backward, while I start at the fountain head and reason down. I take things as history shows them to have been; they take things as they think they ought to have been.

The doctrinaire further says that if the tribesman who made a farm had been satisfied to fence in his farm, only, the common would have remained after all had been supplied. In this country, we have millions of acres of “commons” now waiting any one “member of the tribe” who wants to go and take his share. The truth of it is, the doctrinaire doesn’t want to go out into the wild land and make a farm. He wants to stay where he is, and take one that some other fellow has made. Especially doth he crave a slice of the Astor estate, which doctrinaires have talked of so much that they can almost identify their shares therein.

One of the doctrinaires quotes the following from “Progress and Poverty”: “If a fair distribution of land were made among the whole population, giving to each his equal share, and laws enacted which would impose a barrier to the tendency to concentration, by forbidding the holding by anyone of more than a fixed amount, what would become of the increased population?”

I do not consider it any part of my task to assail the position taken in “Progress and Poverty,” but I think it a satisfactory answer to the foregoing question to say that in the very nature of things posterity must be the heirs-at-law of the conditions of those who went before. To say that we can so frame a social fabric as flexibly and automatically to give an equal share of everything to every child born into the world hereafter, regardless of whether that child’s parents were thrifty, industrious, virtuous people, or, on the other hand, were thriftless, indolent, vicious people, seems to me to be one of the wildest dreams that ever entered the human mind. No matter how equal material conditions might be made today by legislation, the inherent inequality in the capacities of men, physically, mentally, spiritually, would evolve differences tomorrow. There is no such thing as equality among men, and no law will ever give it to them. What the father gains the children lose; and the grandchildren may regain. While one man runs the race of life and wins it; another man, equally tall and strong will run the race and lose it. Just why, it is, in some cases, difficult to tell.

Some men naturally lead; some naturally follow; some naturally command; others naturally obey: some are naturally strong; others are naturally weak. The law of life to some is activity; others say that they were born tired; and there is a certain pathos in their excuse for indolence, for they were born tired. One man is naturally brave—physically, morally—and he will venture. Another man is naturally a coward—physically or morally—and he will not venture. A dozen different traits, or combination of traits, make failure or success in life, and to say that success or failure, vice and virtue, good and bad, are the results of environment and social conditions, is as misleading, as a general statement of fundamental facts, as to say that the dove and the hawk, the tiger and the sheep, the rattlesnake and the harmless “black runner” are the results of environment. Nature in its act of creation made the difference between the fowls of the air, the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea, the men and women who inhabit the earth. From the remotest ages, of which we have record, human nature has been the same that it is today. Paganism presented precisely the same types of man in its savagery and its civilization that Christianity now presents in its savagery and civilization. “There is nothing new under the sun,” and the very theories which the doctrinaires now think are matters of modern discovery, unknown to our ancestors, and which would have been adopted had our ancestors been as wise as we, were discussed in the days of Aristotle and had the very best thought of the sages of antiquity.

Let it be remembered, however, that I have always qualified the Private Ownership of Land by acknowledging the supremacy of the State. The tribe, the community, the State, the Government holds supreme power over the life and liberty of citizens, and over the ownership of the soil. The State calls for me to give up my individual pursuits, my individual liberty, my individual preference, and to take my place as a soldier in the ranks of the army. I am compelled to obey; that is an obligation which rests upon me as a member of society. Thus the State can demand my life of me whenever the State declares that it is necessary for the defence of the State. In like manner, the State can restrain me of my liberty. For instance, in times of epidemics, we have shotgun quarantine which destroys my liberty of movement. I would be shot down like a dog if I sought to break through the lines of quarantine, although to make such an escape might mean my individual salvation, whereas obedience to law amounts to sentence of death. In this case, as in the other, the State practically demands my life as an individual as a sacrifice for the good of the greater number of citizens. So, as to property, no man holds an absolute title to land as against the State. The Government, acting for all the tribe, for all the people, can tear down or burn my house to stop the spread of fire. It can confiscate my property for public purposes, when the public need requires it. It can take my land for public buildings, for canals, for railroads, or for new dirt roads through the country. My rights in the premises would be recognized in the payment to me of damages. My individual rights would be assessed in so many dollars and cents. Thus my home, which might be almost as dear to me as my life, would be coldly valued in money, and although I left it with bitter regrets, even with bitter tears and a bitter sense of wrong, I would have to surrender my individual preference to what is supposed to be by constituted authorities the necessity of the State. This right of the public to take away any portion of the soil from the individual, and to dedicate it to the use of the public, is called the right of Eminent Domain, and is a remnant of the old system which recognized that the title to all the lands was in the King. Of course the King stood for the State. Centered in the personal sovereign were those sovereign rights which belong to the people as a whole, and the people as a whole, represented by the King, were admitted to be the owners of the ultimate fee in the land, and could compel any individual to surrender his individual holdings for the benefit of the entire people, just compensation having first been paid to the individual. It is in that sense that I say private ownership of land is just as holy a principle, just as equitable, as private ownership in the basket which I made from the rushes I gathered along the stream, or from the splints which I rived out from the white oak; just as sacred as my right to the boat which I hollowed out from the forest tree, or the bark hut, or the hut of skins, which my labor erected to shelter me and my family.

The doctrinaire asks: “Could he not be as secure in his possession if the land were owned and exaction made by all the people?” Certainly. That is my contention. The whole tribe did exercise dominion over the land, but to encourage the individual member of the tribe to improve a particular portion of the wild land, the tribe agreed to protect the individual in that which his labor had created, namely a farm. My contention now is that the ultimate ownership of the land is in all the people; but society had a perfect right to divide it on such terms as were thought best and to guarantee to each individual “security of possession,” or title, to that which he had produced. The great trouble with Mr. Doctrinaire is that he does not begin at the beginning. If he would study the condition of the human race as it gradually evolved from the patriarchal state, the tribal state, the nomad state, into that fixed and complex status which we now call “Christian Civilization,” he would readily understand how private ownership of land was the axis upon which the improvement of the conditions of the individual and of the State turned. As long as tribes wandered about from province to province, with their herds of goats, or sheep, or cattle, nibbling the grass which nature put up, and moving onward to another pasture as fast as one was exhausted, there could be nothing but tent life, nothing but personal property. The house had to move every time the family moved. Therefore, when the herds devoured the grass in one place, and the tribe had to move to another, tents were struck, the few household goods were packed on the backs of the wives, or on the backs of other beasts of burden, and the family moved. When man and beast multiplied to such an extent that nature no longer supplied a sufficiency of food, it became necessary for the tribe to settle down, and to divide the territory upon which they settled among the various members of the tribe. That was done in Germany, as well as in various other countries, but I take Germany because the German tribes were our own ancestors. They divided the lands every year. It was seldom the case that the same tribesman occupied the same home for more than one year. Like the Methodist preachers of today, their homes were always on the go. The farmer’s home in those days was precisely like the Methodist preachers’ homes today—a matter to be fixed at the annual conference. The Methodist preacher who today is preaching in the town may next year be sent into the remote rural precincts: the mountain parson may next year be sent to the seaboard. The church is fixed and the parsonage is stationary, but the preacher and his wife and his children are forever moving. Now in precisely the same manner the tribesmen of the German tribes used to be going from farm to farm, and there were no considerable improvements made while that state of affairs existed. Why? Because we are just so constituted that we do not care to build houses for other people to live in, if we know it. When we start out to beautify a home, we may never enjoy it, but we expect to do so at the time, and without that expectation there would be no beautiful homes.