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tinction of these tenures in common, and the enclosure of the lands, created individual ownership in the modern sense, and with it competitive rents. Down to quite recent times the rent of land even in England was fixed by custom, not by competition, and much of it is still so held. But English economists, following Adam Smith and Ricardo, have always assumed that competitive are the only true rents, just as English lawyers have assumed that all customary rights are usurpations on the rights of the lord of the manor. Both opinions had their excuse in the almost if not quite universal ignorance of the historical fact; both have done great mischief to the common people, by fostering the notion that the traditional customary rights of the people to the land could be set aside without injustice.

"These tenures afford confirmation of the doubts suggested in Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities respecting the historical truth of the economic theory of the origin of rent. Early land-rents were not competitive rents; they were not at all in conformity with Mr. Ricardo's doctrine; they bore, for the most part, no relation to the fertility of the soil, or its vicinity to market, if there was any market at all. Each manor was, as it were, a separate territory, inhabited by a distinct community. There was no competition for the tenure of farms from without; and within the manor the sole regulators of rent were the arbitrary will of the lord, and custom. The rent of the villein was at first, in theory at least, an arbitrary rent; in its next stage it was a customary rent, in labor or produce; in a third stage it became commuted into a moneyrent, based on a valuation of the customary service or payments in kind. In the book before us [Blount's Tenures of Land] we have many examples of the customary rent in labor and in kind, and of the commuted money-rent; but there is not a single example of a competitive rent. Competitive rents only began with enclosures and the disruption of the old maporial community; and customary rents survive to this day in many a manor, in defiance of economic theory" (The Athenæum, 1874).

The only early instance of a rent not fixed by custom is that provided for in one of the old Irish laws, in which a member of one group, becoming an outcast, becomes the tenant of another. Of such a tenant as large a rent as could be exacted, might be justly demanded; but of a member of the sept itself only a fair (i. e., a customary) rent could be exacted.

§ 100. Mr. Ricardo is wrong in his very first premise.

"The

elements of value to" the first settlers of a new country "" are not the resources that are capable of development through industry and enterprise, but those which offer the readiest supply of the necessaries of life" (J. H. Burton). They do not begin with the best soil, and afterwards proceed to that which is worse, however natural and reasonable it may seem to assume that they do so. The best soil is usually not known to them as such; even if it were, it is nearly always inaccessible to them. Through its very wealth, it is not unusually covered with timber, whose clearance is impossible to them. More commonly it is marshy, and requires what would be to them a vast expenditure of labor to drain it. It lies in the lower parts of the country, to which the aqueous circulation has been for ages carrying down the richest elements of the soil. It is infested with malarias, bred of vegetable decay. It is utterly devoid of those natural facilities for defence, which in most situations are imperiously necessary to the settler.

The progress of civilization in all ages, therefore, has been from the thin and poor soils high up the rivers to the richer soils that lie nearer their mouths. The retrogression of civilization has been the abandonment of the richer soils and the retreat up the hillsides to those that are lighter and less fertile.

The next chapter gives the historical proofs of these facts, and of the true law of settlement.

The great means that has enabled men to pass from the poorer soils to the richer is the power of coöperation that increases with the growth of numbers, unless some artificial obstacle has been interposed to prevent it. The sudden decline of numbers, or the diminution of the power of association, has had the effect of driving men back from the land that richly repays the labor expended upon it, to the soil that furnishes natural drainage, that can be ploughed with a crooked sapling and harrowed with a thorny bush. The labor expended upon such soil is slightly repaid; the crop reaped is therefore dear; but necessity has no choice.

CHAPTER SIXTH.

THE NATIONAL ECONOMY OF LAND (continued): How THE EARTH WAS OCCUPIED.

§ 101. The historical refutation of Mr. Ricardo's theory, which is presented by the history of the settlement of the various countries of the earth, was first given to the world by Mr. H. C. Carey in his book The Past, the Present and the Future (1848). It is worthy of study, not only as a refutation of a dismal theory of the destiny of mankind, but for the light it casts upon the economic side of the world's history, and indirectly upon other sides also. It might be easily and fairly elaborated into an economical history of the earth, for that history is nothing but the story of man's victory over nature's resistance and the progressive mastery of her manifold utilities.

§ 102. The theory that we are discussing was devised to explain the condition of Great Britain, but no English antiquarian would have given such an account of the settlement of the country. When the Romans invaded England, it was at most about half as populous as at the date of the Norman conquest. "The woods must have been larger, the fens had not been partially reclaimed and made accessible by causeways; some of the tribes were unacquainted with tillage; the beech tree, which doubled our food for swine, had not been introduced; half the roots, vegetables and fruits, which now supplement our corncrops, had not passed the Channel, and the great roads were not yet made on which the plenty of a fortunate district could be transported to parts where the crops had failed. The stunted British cattle, whose remains we constantly disinter, are proof that even if tillage was known, a large portion of the population lived upon milk. The best peopled parts of England were probably those which were most open and easy to cultivate; the home counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, and the south-western counties." A "mighty sum of toil has transformed the country

throughout England. The fens and forests are a mere memory and a name; foreign trees grow in our hedge-rows; it is difficult to find a point within half a mile of which a road does not run; the climate has been modified as woods have been felled and marshes drained; our rivers are smaller than in the old days. Thanks to these labors, and to those marvellous changes in agricultural science, which may bear comparison with any triumphs of mechanics, England, left to her own resources, can now support four times the population that the country contained under Edward III., eight times our number at the period of the Norman conquest, and perhaps sixteen men for one whom Cæsar found in the island."

In this and the following paragraphs quotations not otherwise credited, and much besides, are from Mr. C. H. Pearson's Historical Maps of England, with Explanatory Essays (2d edition. London, 1870). Mr. Pearson tries to account for many of the facts by military and politica. reasons, having no knowledge of the true law of the occupation of the land.

§103. The Celtic tribes whom the Romans found in the island do not seem to have been either numerous or powerful, as the invading army that added the island to the Roman Empire numbered but 30,000 men. The home of the several tribes is in every case but one uncertain, but they seem to have been confined to the hills of the north and to the hill system of the south and west coasts, which opposes its cliffs to the currents from the Atlantic, and is divided from the rest of the island by the old Roman military road from London through Chester, which the Saxons called Watling Street.

The monumental remains of the ante-Roman epoch indicate this. "The earliest grave mounds are mostly found in the mountainous districts of the land,-among the hills and fastnesses; the later [Roman and Saxon] overspreading hill, valley and plain alike. Thus in Cornwall, in Yorkshire, in Derbyshire and in Dorsetshire, in Wiltshire and many other districts, the earliest interments are or have been abundant; while the later ones, besides being mixed up with them in the districts named,

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are spread over every other county. In the counties just named Celtic remains more abound than those of any other period. In Dorsetshire, for instance, that county,' as the venerable Stukeley declares, 'for sight of barrows not to be equalled in the whole world,' the early mounds abound on the downs and the lofty Ridgeway, an immense range of hills of some forty miles in extent,—while those of a later period lie in other parts of the county. In Yorkshire again they abound chiefly in the wolds; and in Cornwall on the highlands. The same again of Derbyshire, where they lie for the most part scattered over the wild mountainous region of the Peak,—a district occupying nearly one-half of the county, and containing within its limits many towns, villages and other places of extreme interest. In this it resembles Dorsetshire, for in the district occupied by the Ridgeway and the downs are very many highly interesting and important places. It is true that here and there in Derbyshire, as in other counties, an early grave mound exists in the southern or lowland portion of the county. There are districts where there is scarcely a hill even in. that land [of hills] where a barrow does not exist or is not known to have existed."

See Grave Mounds and their Contents, by Llellwyn Jewett. London, 1870.

§ 104. West of Watling Street lay (1) the ancient kingdom of Cornwall, which must have been densely peopled, as we learn from the Roman lists of towns, the traces of ancient agriculture and the abundance of ancient remains. Here is the seat of the events now clothed in poetry in the Arthur-Sagas. The land is now mostly abandoned by the farmer to the fisherman and the miner. (2) Wales, whose mountains were fought for as a prize by the two great branches of the Celtic race. (3) The Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, which includes the Galwegian district of Scotland and the lake district of England. When the Roman occupation ceased, we find the Celts confined to this district and the south coast. Their literature "shows no acquaintance with the country east-let us say-of the second degree of