Landholding In England | Page 5

the property of him who captures or kills them. This acute thinker seems to me to have fallen into a mistake by confounding land with labor. The improvements were the property of the man who made them, but it by no means follows that the expenditure of labor on land gave any greater right than to the labor itself or its representative.
It may not be out of place here to allude to the use of the word property with reference to land; property--from proprium, my own-- is something pertaining to man. I have a property in myself. I have the right to be free. All that proceeds from myself, my thoughts, my writings, my works, are property; but no man made land, and therefore it is not property. This incorrect application of the word is the more striking in England, where the largest title a man can have is "tenancy in fee," and a tenant holds but does not own.
Sir William Blackstone places the possession of land upon a different principle. He says that, as society became formed, its instinct was to preserve the peace; and as a man who had taken possession of land could not be disturbed without using force, each man continued to enjoy the use of that which he had taken out of the common stock; but, he adds, that right only lasted as long as the man lived. Death put him out of possession, and he could not give to another that which he ceased to possess himself.
Vattel (book i., chap, vii.) tells us that "the whole earth is destined to feed its inhabitants; but this it would be incapable of doing if it were uncultivated. Every nation is then obliged by the law of nature to cultivate the land that has fallen to its share, and it has no right to enlarge its boundaries or have recourse to the assistance of other nations, but in proportion as the land in its possession is incapable of furnishing it with necessaries." He adds (chap. xx.), "When a nation in a body takes possession of a country, everything that is not divided among its members remains common to the whole nation, and is called public property."
An ancient Irish tract, which forms part of the Senchus Mor, and is supposed to be a portion of the Brehon code, and traceable to the time of St. Patrick, speaks of land in a poetically symbolic, but actually realistic manner, and says, "Land is perpetual man." All the ingredients of our physical frame come from the soil. The food we require and enjoy, the clothing which enwraps us, the fire which warms us, all save the vital spark that constitutes life, is of the land, hence it is "perpetual man." Selden ("Titles of Honor," p. 27), when treating of the title "King of Kings," refers to the eastern custom of homage, which consisted not in offering the person, but the elements which composed the person, EARTH and WATER--"the perpetual man" of the Brehons--to the conqueror. He says:
"So that both titles, those of King of Kings and Great King, were common to those emperors of the two first empires; as also (if we believe the story of Judith) that ceremonies of receiving an acknowledgment of regal supremacy (which, by the way, I note here, because it was as homage received by kings in that time from such princes or people as should acknowledge themselves under their subjection) by acceptance upon their demand of EARTH and WATER. This demand is often spoken of as used by the Persian, and a special example of it is in Darius' letters to Induthyr, King of the Scythians, when he first invites him to the field; but if he would not, then bringing to your sovereign as gifts earth and water, come to a parley. And one of Xerxes' ambassadors that came to demand earth and water from the state of Lacedaemon, to satisfy him, was thrust into a well and earth cast upon him."
The earlier races seem to me, either by reasoning or by instinct, to have arrived at the conclusion that every man was, in right of his being, entitled to food; that food was a product of the land, and therefore every man was entitled to the possession of land, otherwise his life depended upon the will of another. The Romans acted on a different principle, which was "the spoil to the victors." He who could not defend and retain his possessions became the slave of the conqueror, all the rights of the vanquished passed to the victor, who took and enjoyed as ample rights to land as those naturally possessed by the aborigines.
The system of landholding varies in different countries, and we cannot discover any idea of abstract right underlying the various differing