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Private title in commodities is inseparable from private title in the instruments by which commodities are produced, i. e., the land, labor, and other means of their production. If the latter are owned in common by all, the former must be allotted so that each shall get a share proportionate either to his needs, his desert, or his importunity and troublesomeness. This, as we have seen, is done in all socialistic and tribal stages of growth. But in this condition of things the collective state, or its chief, is the only exchanger, and it can only exchange with somebody outside its frontiers. Members of a state, which provides for all its members out of a public crib, have no motive to exchange and no private title to commodities. A social, tribal, or communal ownership in land, by involving logically a like ownership of labor, goods, and products, perpetuates poverty, slavery, and indolence, by paralyzing commerce.

55. Titles Becoming Private.-The first essential condition to commerce and division of labor being private ownership of land and goods, it follows that the growth of a country in wealth, production, and civilization will depend largely on the degree in which it asserts this principle of private ownership, i. e., the promptness with which it converts its lands from tribal, communal, or national to individual ownership.*

*It seems to have been a notion generally entertained in the ancient world that every citizen of a country should be a landholder; and that the territory of a state, so far as it was not left uninclosed or reserved for public purposes, should be divided in equal portions among the citizens. Such a distribution of public land seems to have been acted upon as a recognized principle from the earliest period to which existing historical records extend. (Encyclop. Brit.-Art. Agrarian Laws.) Hence the division of Canaan into private allotments to every Hebrew (Numb. xxxiii. 54), naming every allottee (Numb. xxxiv. 18). The year of jubilee did not return these lands thus privately allotted into hodge podge or communal ownership, but only restored them from grantees and mortgagees to their original owners or their heirs (Numb, xxv. 10). In the republics of ancient Greece and in the Grecian colonies a similar system of division prevailed (Thucyd., v. 4; Herod., iv. 159). Lycurgus is represented by Plutarch (Lycur.) as redividing the whole territory of Laconia into 39,000 parcels, of which 9,000 were assigned in equal lots to as many Spartan families, and 30,000 also in equal lots to their free subjects (ib.). But this equal division of land between private owners did not imply among the Greeks that the equality of ownership should be forcibly maintained. The enactments among the Romans for dividing the public domain (ager publicus) among private holders were called Agrarian laws. For a long time they were misunderstood to mean enactments for prohibiting Roman citizens from owning lands above a fixed amount, and as authorizing the division among the poorer classes of the estates of private individuals when these exceeded the prescribed limit, thus legalizing a system of plunder which would have been subversive of all social order. No such laws were enacted in Rome or any other state. The Agrarian laws merely provided that where citizens had appropriated more of the public domain than they were by law al. lowed to do they should be required to restore, but had no relation to lands acquired by

NEW MODES OF PRIVATE TITLE.

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The distribution of the land of the United States, from the form of communal ownership in which it was held by the Indian tribes, and in which it was first feebly attempted to be held by the settlers at New Haven, Jamestown, and Plymouth, into private ownership, was a substitution of self-interest in lieu of social interest as the motive to industry. The intrusting to private railway corporations, of the business of giving cheap transportation to markets, came to be a means of effecting a most important public function entirely at private risk as to loss, and at private cost as to capital. The evolution of the land system and the railway system of the United States were thus the concurrent working of the principle that private title, or the profits of monopoly, form a far stronger inducement than public spirit, to the expenditure of inventive force, and of capital, in ways that are socialistic in their results. Nothing serves society at large more usefully than steamers, railways, printing presses, telegraph facilities, power looms, spinning jennies, the manufacture of India rubber, photography and the like. But to perfect each of these in the breadth of its social use, i. e., in the number of persons who might enjoy its use, some new form of aggression on private right was invented and sanctioned by law and some new mode of private title was created. For railways, their projectors were allowed to take lands for a way over which they alone could draw their carriages. Previous ways had been open to the carriages of all. For the highest utility of printing presses men were denied the right to manufacture copies, indefinitely, of any book they might possess. For, when all books were written, every

purchase, or otherwise than by fencing in, unlawfully, portions of the public domain. (Encyclop, Brit.-Art. Agrarian Laws.) This was demonstrated by Prof. Heyne of Gottingen in 1793, by Heeren and Hegewisch and by Niebuhr (ib.).

In its article on commons the Encyclopedia Brittannica says: "It is a well-known result of the application of the historical method to laws and institutions that it has reversed many of our leading conceptions of the natural or original forms of property. That the primitive form of property in land was not severalty but commonalty, that land was held not by individuals but by communities, and that individual ownership was slowly evolved out of communal ownership, are propositions as nearly as possible the opposite of our a priori ideas on the subject. The existence of rights of common is one of the traces of the ancient system still remaining in our law, but its real significance was for a long time obscured by the feudal theories on which the law of real property is based. Among the English, as among other Teutonic nations, the system of landholding by village communities prevailed. . . The increase of the population and the growing need for food-producing land made it the interest of both the lord and of the public also that much of the common ground should be brought under cultivation. Down to the year 1800 this was effected by private inclosure acts, of which there were as many as 1600 or 1700,

scribe was free to copy any book. With printing came the new form of monopoly known as copyright. And this monopoly, in the profit of multiplying copies of a book, effects a far greater multiplication of copies than would be effected without it.

Land being the primary implement, agent, and condition of all production of commodities, the first economic requisite to the rapid and cheap production of them all, is that title to land shall be easily obtainable, and when obtained, shall be easily defended. When, to these, are added ready access to the consumers of land products, and a free influx of all the industries which can use the land most productively for mankind, all the conditions of growth in wealth are assured. The monopoly of land by great families in England causes the government there to be aristocratic. The early diffusion of land in America caused the republic.

56. The American Land System.-A few colonists came to America for opinion's sake, and a few for crime. The great mass came hither for profit, to better their pecuniary condition. Had the governments, which first obtained footing in America, limited the land system by making large grants to a few proprietaries, and exacting that these should grant only leases to tenants; and had they, without jealousy, created the large proprietors into a peerage, with like powers to that of England, including seats in the British House of Lords, while the colonial delegates should have like seats in the Commons, it is difficult to prove that the Anglo-Saxon race might not have continued to this day to be one empire. A difference in the allotment of land left the colonies without the materials for representation in the House of Lords. The creation of colonial legislatures provided them with a satisfactory substitute for the Commons. Hence the colonies fell away from Great Britain, because not allowed a representation they had never desired. During the colonial period the increase in population in the territory of what are now the United States was slow. The entire population in 1680, sixty years after the landing at Plymouth and seventy-three years after the settlement of Virginia, was only 80,000; in 1701 it had grown to 260,000; in 1753 to 1,051,000; in 1775 an official estimate made it 2,383,000; and in the first census of 1790 it was as follows:

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During the first ten years of independence immigrants came to the number of only 4,000 yearly, and in 1794, the year of the French Revolution, to 6,000.

The cession of large portions of land to private aristocratic proprietors, and the restrictions forbidding the colonists to manufacture machinery, cloths, iron, steel, etc., contributed, with the insecurity attending pioneer life among savages, to check immigration. Some of the private proprietors, including at least those in New York, intended to follow the English or feudal precedent of renting their lands to tenants, retaining forever the fee. Such a system, logically carried out, would have resulted in a landed nobility and House of Lords like those of Great Britain.

With the establishment of national independence in 1783,* the legal theory became, in the United States, that all titles to land are derived from the government of the United States, as in England it had been that all lands are held immediately or ultimately of the king. Within the original States, only the lands remaining unappropriated, and those belonging to Tory owners, and passing by forfeiture to the government, ever actually vested in the United States. By the acquisition of the Northwest Territory and Louisiana it devolved on the government to become the distributor, to private owners, of an area east of the Rocky Mountains, as large as China, and half as large as Europe. The present total area of the United States, including Alaska, is 3,603,884 English square miles, exclusive of the lakes and other waters, while that of Europe is 3,828,328 square miles.

The policy adopted by the United States was that of giving the lands to actual settlers, at a price per acre barely sufficient to pay the cost of survey and of the land department, surveying the lands on lines corresponding to the four cardinal points of the compass, so that the exact location of all lands for transfer, occupancy, or search of title could be expressed by a brief formula. This was done by running a meridian line north and south through some arbitrary point selected for convenience, then a base line east and west through the same point. One point of this kind exists in Ohio, and the meridian line which runs through it is called the first principal meridian, or in the language of con

* Supreme Ct., Johnson vs. McIntish, 8 Wheat. 543 ‡ 3 Op. Art. Gen. 333.

veyancing 1st P. M. The second principal meridian line is in Indiana; the third makes its point of intersection with the base line at Vandalia, Illinois, the fourth in Western Iowa, etc. Lines drawn parallel to the meridian line at intervals of six miles, whether eastward or westward, are called ranges, those to the eastward being range 1, 2, 3, etc., east, and those to the westward, range 1, 2, 3, etc., west of the meridian. Lines drawn parallel with the base line, whether to the northward or southward of it, become township lines, since the intersection of each with the meridian lines marks a plot six miles square, which is the township of the land surveyors. In fact, also, the organization of the people into townships usually follows these lines. The location of the township, east or west of the meridian, is designated by the range number, and its location north or south of the base line by the township number. Thus T. 38, N. R. 14 E. of 3 P. M. in Cook County, Ill., designates a township, being the 38th to the northward of the base line, in the range (of townships) which are on the meridian line the 14th eastward from the 3d principal meridian. Each township is divided by similar

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The sections proceed by halving and quartering, or otherwise, until the definite lot, however small, is reached. Property worth millions may be thus described as lot 44 and N of lot 43, in block 2, Lockwood's subdivision of south half of W. of N. E. ¿ of N. W. of section 3, T. 38 N. R. 14 E. of 3 P. M. The starting point of this description is at Vandalia, yet the land which it accurately describes is near Chicago.

The simplicity and celerity with which conveyances can be executed and recorded, and titles searched, and certified, is also an element in bringing about the easy transferability of land. The

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