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LECTURES

ON THE

EARLY HISTORY OF INSTITUTIONS.

LECTURE I.

NEW MATERIALS FOR THE EARLY HISTORY

OF INSTITUTIONS.

THE SOURCES of information concerning the early history of institutions which have been opened to us during the last few years are numerous and valuable. On one subject in particular, which may be confidently said to have been almost exclusively investigated till lately by writers who had followed a false path, the additions to our knowledge are of special interest and importance. We at length know something concerning the beginnings of the great institution of Property in Land. The collective ownership of the soil by groups of men either in fact united by blood-relationship, or believing or assuming that they are so united, is now entitled to take rank as an ascertained primitive phenomenon, once universally characterising those communities of mankind between whose civilisation and our own there is any distinct

B

2

LANDED PROPERTY IN RUSSIA.

LECT. I.

connection or analogy. The evidence has been found on all sides of us, dimly seen and verifiable with difficulty in countries which have undergone the enormous pressure of the Roman Empire, or which have been strongly affected by its indirect influence, but perfectly plain and unmistakeable in the parts of the world, peopled by the Aryan race, where the Empire has made itself felt very slightly or not at all. As regards the Sclavonic communities, the enfranchisement of the peasantry of the Russian dominions in Europe has given a stimulus to enquiries which formerly had attractions for only a few curious observers, and the amount of information collected has been very large. We now know much more clearly than we did before that the soil of the older provinces of the Russian Empire has been, from time immemorial, almost exclusively distributed among groups of self-styled kinsmen, collected in cultivating village-communities, selforganised and self-governing; and, since the great measure of the present reign, the collective rights of these communities, and the rights and duties of their members in respect of one another, are no longer entangled with and limited by the manorial privileges of an owner-in-chief. There is also fresh evidence that the more backward of the outlying Sclavonic societies are constituted upon essentially the same model; and it is one of the facts with which the Western world will some day assuredly have to reckon, that the political

LECT. I.

VESTIGES OF VILLAGE-COMMUNITY.

3

ideas of so large a portion of the human race, and its ideas of property also, are inextricably bound up with the notions of family interdependency, of collective ownership, and of natural subjection to patriarchal power. The traces of the ancient social order in the Germanic and Scandinavian countries are, I need scarcely say, considerably fainter, and tend always to become more obscured; but the reexamination of the written evidence respecting ancient Teutonic life and custom proceeds without intermission, and incidentally much light has been thrown on the early history of property by the remarkable work of Sohm ('Fränkische Reichs-und Gerichtsverfassung'). The results obtained by the special method of G. L. Von Maurer have meantime been verified by comparison with phenomena discovered in the most unexpected quarters. The researches of M. de Laveleye, in particular, have been conducted over a field of very wide extent; and, although I dissent from some of the economic conclusions to which he has been led, I cannot speak too highly of the value of the materials collected by him, and described in the recently published volume which he has entitled 'La Propriété et ses Formes Primitives.' I have not observed that the vestiges left on the soil and law of England and of the Scottish Lowlands by the ancient Village-Community have been made the subject of any published work since the monograph

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