meadows, fields, villages, and towns; flowing slowly and noiselessly, but spreading happiness, fertility, and abundance around; serving as a mighty high road to connect nations, through their most noble outgrowths, their philosophers and searchers for truth, into one grand progressively advancing community.

The great and inexhaustible means of furthering this union is an indefatigable study of history. For is it not a calumny of the Creator, whose wisdom we continually praise in a thousand tongues, to assume that we ought to study only certain of His works, and neglect altogether man in his gradual development as the Creator's fairest product? In the unconscious regions of the empire of nature, in stars and nebulæ, solar systems, crystallisations and chemical combinations, we trace wisdom, law, and order; only the stages of man's intellectual activity, as they present themselves in history, are looked upon as an eternal reproach to the Creator, who is assumed to have acted on firm principles in the minutest of His inorganic or organic creatures, but who is thought to have left humanity without aim, law, or purpose, on this globe, so that we are forced to turn our eyes despairingly from this world, and to hope for the fulfilment of our destiny in un-· known regions.

History, treated from a scientific point of view, teaches us that this is not the case.

History, as it is usually written, without the basis of a general principle, or merely as an accumulation of disconnected facts, state-enactments, or copied documents, collected in musty archives, is only very useful building material, out of which we have to construct an intelligible and comprehensive system of history. It is distressing to contemplate what later generations may do with history if details grow in the ratio of the last few hundred years. Unfortunately professed historians ignorant as they too often are, assert that "history is a mere child's box of letters, out of which the historian picks what he wants to spell out; but this is the view of a narrowminded state-paper copyist, and not of a philosophical his

torian, whose aim can never be to glorify individuals, or to distort facts according to the wants of a party or the fashion of a period, but to look upon humanity as one great whole, and to trace in its complicated actions, order based on law.

The historical world is as little barred as the ideal worldboth are open; it is our faculty of seeing blinded by details, it is our mind confused by isolated facts, that will or cannot comprehend the stern law that drives man towards his real destiny-the greatest possible happiness of all united into one common brotherhood.

THE HISTORY OF LANDHOLDING IN ENGLAND.

BY JOSEPH FISHER, ESQ.,

Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

I Do not propose to enter upon the system of landholding in Scotland or Ireland, which appears to me to bear the stamp of the Celtic origin of the people, and which was preserved in Ireland long after it had disappeared in other European countries formerly inhabited by the Celts. That ancient race may be regarded as the original settlers of a large portion of the European continent, and its land system possesses a remarkable affinity to that of the Slavonic, the Hindoo, and even the New Zealand races. It was originally Patriarchal, and then Tribal, and was Communistic in its character.

I do not pretend to great originality in my views. My efforts have been to collect the scattered rays of light, and to bring them to bear upon one interesting topic. The present is the child of the past. The ideas of bygone races affect the practices of living people. We form but parts of a whole; we are influenced by those who preceded us, and we shall influence those who come after us. Men cannot disassociate themselves either from the past or the future.

In looking at this question there is, I think, a vast difference which has not been sufficiently recognised. It is the broad distinction between the system arising out of the original occupation of land, and that proceeding out of the necessities of conquest; perhaps I should add a third-the complex system proceeding from an amalgamation, or from the existence of both systems in the same nation. Some countries have been so repeatedly swept over by the tide of conquest

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that but little of the aboriginal ideas or systems have survived the flood. Others have submitted to a change of governors and preserved their customary laws; while in others there has been such a fusion of the two systems that we cannot decide which of the ingredients was the older, except by a process of analysis, and a comparison of the several products of the alembic with the recognised institutions of the class of original, or of invading peoples.

Efforts have been made, and not with very great success, to define the principle which governed the more ancient races with regard to the possession of land. While unoccupied or unappropriated, it was common to every settler. It existed for the use of the whole human race. The process by which that which was common to all, became the possession of the individual, has not been clearly stated. The earlier settlers were either individuals, families, tribes, or nations. In some cases they were nomadic, and used the natural products without taking possession of the land; in others they occupied districts differently defined. The individual was the unit of the family, the patriarch of the tribe. The commune was formed to afford mutual protection. Each sept or tribe in the early enjoyment of the products of the district it selected was governed by its own customary laws. The cohesion of these tribes into states was a slow process; the adoption of a general system of government still slower. The disintegration of the tribal system, and dissolution of the commune, was not evolved out of the original elements of the system itself, but was the effect of conquest; and, as far as I can discover, the appropriation to individuals of land which was common to all, was mainly brought about by conquest, and was guided by impulse, rather than regulated by principle.

Mr Locke thinks that an individual became sole owner of a part of the common heritage by mixing his labour with the land, in fencing it, making wells, or building; and he illustrates his position by the appropriation of wild animals, which are common to all sportsmen, but become 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 labour. The improvements were the property of the man who made them, but it by no means follows that the expenditure of labour on land gave any greater right than to the labour 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 propria, my own self-is something pertaining to man. I have a pro

perty 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