With the exception of 8,000,000 hectares , held by the independent Kabyles as private property, acquired or preserved fromthe Roman period, and of 8,000,000, also held in private ownership by the Ossians and Kesourians, as waste landsreclaimed, the Pasha of Algiers, in 1880, disposed of an uncontested and almost incontestable right over the remainder of thesoil of Algiers. By the Senatus-consult of 1863, the Emperor renounced all these rights characterising them as "obsolete;"and declared the tribes and douar communities to be the proprietors of the lands they held, whatever their title, withoutpower of alienation. (See Report of M. Warnier, Algerian deputy in the National Assembly, 1878, and La Propriété enAlgerie , by R. Dareste.)
2. See Voyage en Espagne , by Jaubert de Passa.
3. History of Pelew Isles , compiled from Journal of Captain Wilson by George Reade. (Quoted by Viollet, Caractèrecollectif des premières propriétés immobilières ).
4. Année géographique (1878), by M. Vivien de Saint-Martin, p. 267.
5. Les origines de la famille , p. 51.
6. Morgan Smith's Contrib. to Knowledge , Vol. xvii. 254258, 262, and 488.
7. Incidents of travels in Yucatan , Vol. II. p. 14.These quotations with regard to the Indians are borrowed from an articleby Lewis Morgan, in the North American Review , April, 1876.
8. Von Wrangel, Nachrichten , p. 129.
9. Edwards, History, of the West Indies, i. p. 42.
10. Von Wrangel, p. 185.
11. Depona, Voyage , etc., p. 295.
12. See Prescott's Conquest of Peru , where the contemporary evidences are well summed up.
13. See La vie des Afghans , by Forgues, Revue des Deux-Mondes , Oct. 1863; and Elphinstone, Cabal , ii. p. 17.
14. System des Volkswirthschaft , B. ii. p. 190.
15. Krug, Geschichte der Staatswirth. Gesetz-Geb. Preussens , i. p. 187.
16. Schubert, Staatskunde , I. 4, p. 269.
17. Wappaens, Nord-Amerika , p. 998.
18. Von Haxthausen, Studien , I, p. 443.
19. Blom, Statistik von Norwegen , I p. 148.
20. John Mill, History of India , I. p. 343.
21. Langethal, Geschichte des deutschen Landwirthschaft , I. p. 12.
22. For these details the author is indebted to a distinguished Danish economist, M. Alekaja Petersen, who has translatedthis work into Danish.
23. Von Hazthausen. Ländliche Verfas , I. 257.
24. Hanssen, Archiv der pol. Oek ., iv. 408.
CHAPTER X
THE GOLDEN AGE AND COLLECTIVE
PROPERTY IN ANTIQUITY.
The question, whether the ancient population of Greece and Italy also lived in village communities, and passed through asystem of collective property in land, before being acquainted with individual ownership, seemed doubtful. Certain authors,such as Lange (1) and M. Fustel de Coulanges, think, that the Greeks and Romans had not traversed the primitive epoch, inwhich the soil was the common property of the tribe or village, as is now the case in Russia, and was formerly among theGermans and Slays. In his excellent work, La Cité Antique , M. Fustel de Coulanges allows the existence of commonproperty in the Roman family: but, he cannot find, either in Greece or Rome, collective property in the tribe. He can see"nothing in the village similar to the promiscuousness, so general in France in the twelfth century. (2) The populations ofGreece and Italy, from the most remote antiquity, were acquainted with and exercised private ownership." (3) It would bevery strange, if these two nations alone had not passed through a system, which, as we have seen, existed in primitive timesamong all other races. After the decisive treatise of M. Paul Viollet, on the Caractère Collectif des Premières PropriétésImmobilières, (4) it is impossible to adopt the opinion of M. Fustel de Coulanges.
In Germany, Puchta in his studies on the Roman law, (5) had already pointed out numerous traces of the eminent domain ofthe state over individual property; and Heineccius, in his treatise on Natural Law, Elementa juris Naturae et Gentium , cap.
ix. ?237, even enumerated populations living in common. Mommsen says, that, in primitive Italy, village communitiesowned collectively the territory in which they were settled.
