VERRI-VETHAKE VERRI, PIETRO (1728-1796) was born at Milan, of a noble family; he first entered the army and fought at Soran in the AustroPrussian war. At Vienna he commenced the study of economics, and wrote the Elementi di commercio; he continued these studies in other publications after his return to Italy. In 1765 he was made a member of the supreme council of economics, and then privy councillor of state. He played an important part in the financial reforms of the Milanese states, especially in the reform of the customs duties tariff, which was entrusted to him. In 1786 he retired into private life and devoted himself to his studies; later on, he again took office at Milan, after the entry of the French. Verri's principal work is the Meditazioni sull' economia politica several times reprinted, also in the Custodi collection and in the Biblioteca dell'economista serie Ia: the Meditazioni were translated three times into French, twice into German, and once into Dutch; they form the best summary of political economy published in Italy in the 18th century, and one of the best in any country. Verri, in this work, makes a minute analysis of production, and examines the different causes which allow a country to gain wealth or prevent it from enriching itself by an excess of production over consumption, thus obtaining a maximum produce on which the increase of population depends. Verri is not content with abstract theory, but studies the actual conditions of different countries, observing the causes which render changes necessary in legislative regulations. He He is, therefore, eclectic; this is chiefly noticeable in the question of international trade, which he examines with great width of view. Without altogether abandoning the principle of the balance of trade, Verri severely criticises it; at the same time he combats the PHYSIOCRATS, showing the productiveness of manufactories. advocates free trade internally, and the free export of corn, at the same time he allows taxation on the export of raw materials, and on the import of foreign manufactured goods; he would protect national industries, observing that the abolition of customs duties would be prudent if simultaneously adopted by all nations, but injurious to any one nation doing so if the others continued these duties. Verri combats an unequal division of wealth and excessive concentration of great properties. He displays sound ideas on value, though he does not attain to the conception of normal value (see VALUE), and endeavours to reduce the laws of value solely to the principle of DEMAND and SUPPLY. 619 He Verri's Meditazioni contain also a perfected and in some part original theory on taxation. considers taxation to be a payment made by a person to the public exchequer of a portion of his possessions in order that he may in safety enjoy the remainder, its necessary limit being fixed by the amount of public expenditure incurred for the good of the community. This becomes injurious when it exceeds the economic resources of a country, and is not proportional to the general wealth, or unequally imposed among private individuals. Every tax tends naturally to level itself uniformly on each citizen in proportion to that which each consumes. The most equitable tax is that which falls directly on the largest consumers, owners of land, buildings, and goods, on whom in any case all taxes would fall. Verri, therefore, proposes a tax on land to reach land-owners, customs duties to touch merchants and those engaged in trade-maintaining that eventually these taxes would reach all consumers. It is easy from the point of view of to-day to criticise Verri's system of taxation, but this does not prevent it from being the best plan which could then have been designed, and in principle it is the basis of the systems elaborated later. Some of Verri's other writings are of great importance. In his philosophic discourses, Discorsi di argomento filosofico, he takes broad views of social economy, discussing the national inclination of man to happiness, the "calculus of pains and pleasures," and the favourable influence of the severer climates on economic development over the more relaxing southern countries of the world. His Memorie storiche, published after his death, on the history of trade in the Milanese states, are amongst the most noteworthy works on Italian economic and financial history. Elementi del commercio, 1765.- Memorie suleconomia pubblica dello stato di Milano, 1768.Meditazioni sull' economia politica, 1771.-Rifles sioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio dei grani, 1796.-Discorsi, etc., 1781. [Ugoni, Della letteratura italiana nella seconda metà del secolo XVIII., 1821.-Cossa, An Introduction to the Study of Political Economy, 1893.— Ricca Salerno, Storia delle dottrine finanziarie in Italia, 1891.-Gobbi, La concorrenza estera e gli antichi economisti italiani, 1884.- Bouvy, Le comte P. Verri, 1889.] U. R. VERT. "Bonnet Vert" or "green cap," in old French law meant a bankrupt who had satisfied the courts. In Scotland, where something like the French practice was adopted, the cleared bankrupt went about in a yellow cap (cp. WHITE BONNET). [See Burton, History of Scotland, vol. viii. p. 70 (ch. lxxxv.)]. J. B. VETHAKE, HENRY (1792-1866), was born in British Guiana and died in Philadelphia, where he had been connected with the university of Pennsylvania in various capacities for thirty years. He took his first degree at Columbia College (New York) in 1808, and taught mathematics and allied subjects in the same institution (1813), in Queen's College, now Rutger's (1813-1817), in Princeton College 620 VICESIMA HAEREDITATUM-VICO (1817-1821), in Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania (1821-1829), and in the university of the city of New York (1832-1835). | In 1835 he became president of Washington College (Lexington, Virginia), and in the following year professor of mathematics in the university of Pennsylvania. Ten years later he was chosen vice-provost, and in 1854 provost. Shortly after becoming provost he exchanged his chair of mathematics for that of intellectual and moral philosophy. After resigning the provostship, he remained emeritus professor in the university, while engaged in teaching higher mathematics in the Philadelphia Polytechnic College. Although never nominally an instructor in political economy, he probably taught that subject in at least four of the schools with which he was connected, since his Principles of Political Economy (Philadelphia, 1838), published two years after he became a professor in the university of Pennsylvania, is dedicated "to the numerous young men who at different periods during the last sixteen years have attended his lectures on political economy." This work is a systematic exposition of the principles of the science as then generally held in England and France. It avoids all reference to writers whose views differ from his own. He attempts a few innovations, prominent among them, the extension of the definition of wealth and of capital to include immaterial or intellectual products, which the author himself calls a bold innovation, though he might have discovered precedent for it among classical writers. Of greater practical value was his American edition of J. R. M'CULLOCH'S (q.v.) Dictionary of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (Philadelphia, 1847). He added many valuable articles, e.g. "A Historical Account of Banking in the United States" (36 pp.), and short supplementary notes on such subjects as American Coinage; Aliens in the United States, etc. E. T. D. VICESIMA HAEREDITATUM. A tax upon successions to property, usually said to have been established by the Emperor Augustus. In the Roman republic direct taxation of citizens had never been more than occasional, and had become obsolete with the growth of the provincial revenues. The reorganisation of the state by Augustus involved a great increase in the ordinary expenditure, and it became necessary that Italy should, as well as the provinces, contribute regularly to the public expenditure. As it was not convenient to subject Italian soil to the land tax levied on the provinces, an equivalent was taken on this tax on successions. As the name shows, it was fixed at the rate of 5 per cent. Exemptions were granted in favour of direct heirs and of persons taking legacies or inheritances below a fixed minimum. The Emperor Caracalla extended this tax to the whole empire by conferring the citizenship of Rome on all its inhabitants other than slaves. He is also said | to have raised it to 10 per cent. Soon after his death it was reduced to its old figure. It disappeared in the later times of the empire. F. C. M. VICO, GIAMBATTISTA (1668-1744), was born at Naples, the son of a bookseller, studied philosophy under the Jesuits, and adopted the profession of advocate, which, however, he soon renounced. The patronage of the bishop of Ischia procured for him employment as teacher of his nephews, the sons of the Marquis Domenico Rocca; this office he held for nine years, during which he earnestly pursued his studies. He was appointed professor of rhetoric in the university of Naples, which office he filled during forty years, not having obtained the great object of his ambition-the chair of In 1744, jurisprudence in that university. the year in which he died, he was nominated historiographer to the king of Naples. Vico was undoubtedly a great and original genius. Professor Flint is justified in the opinion that it is impossible to read him "without feeling oneself in contact with a singularly profound and powerful intelligence." The work on which his reputation rests is Principii di una Scienza Nuova d' intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni, per li quali si ritrovano altri principii del diritto naturale delle genti (1st ed., 1725; 2nd ed. much altered, 1730). This book, on its publication, made an impression in Italy, especially among learned circles at Venice, but was scarcely noticed at all in other European countries before the 19th century. Herder and Wolf referred to it; Salfi called the attention of the French public to it; and Michelet published, in 1835, Euvres choisies de Vico, containing a paraphrase of the Scienza Nuova, with an introduction on the life and writings of the author. Vico's object was to construct "an ideal and eternal history," whose phases should serve as types of the actual revolutions of all ages, within which all the histories of particular nations should take their places in the order of their birth, progress, From the common maturity, decline, and end. nature of nations comes amongst all peoples a "constant and universal knowledge of things human and divine," and thus is discovered, as a principal corollary of the Scienza Nuova, a system of natural law-an "eternal ideal law, which is in force in the universal city, a city founded in the thought of God, and in the form of which are instituted the cities of all times and countries." His ideas are habitually clothed in theological and metaphysical forms; but many of them admit of a scientific interpretation and correspond to doctrines of positive sociology. The threefold basis common to all societies is, in his view, religion, the institution of marriage, and respect for the tomb; every community passes through three stages-a divine, a heroic, and a human age-with successive systems of law, political constitution, morality, respectively corresponding to and characterising these. But he does not go beyond this movement of each society, which he regards as indefinitely recurrent; he does not study, or apparently recognise, the con. VICTUAL BRETHREN-VILLAGE COMMUNITIES tinuous life of humanity-represented, not by a Vico was not specially an economist; but his ideas on the nature and life of political communities are valuable to the economist, who cannot correctly understand the phenomena with which he is primarily concerned, if he does not view them in relation to the general structure and development of society. There is a complete edition of Vico's works by Giuseppe Ferrari, in 6 vols. (Milan, 1844). The Scienza Nuova has been literally translated into French by the Princess Belgiojoso (1844). There is no English translation. [Introduction to Michelet's Œuvres de Vico.Professor Flint's Vico in Blackwood's Philosophical Classics for English Readers.] a 621 necessity of a navy. Convoys of ships began to be formed, and in 1406 the merchants were authorised to take dues on staple exports and 38. on every cask of imported wine to defray the expenses of two admirals, appointed by the king, to defend the north and south coasts. In a few years this system broke down, but in 1453 the earls Salisbury, Shrewsbury, Worcester, and Wiltshire, and Lord Sturton, were empowered to collect TONNAGE AND POUNDAGE, and to raise money on the security of these taxes, in payment for the defence of the coasts. Though this arrangement also speedily failed, a precedent had been set that in the end prevailed. L. R. H. VIDAL, FRANÇOIS (b. 1812), marked the transition in France from the utopian socialism of ST. SIMON and FOURIER to collectivist socialism. Vidal, however, does not go so far as this in his conclusions. He contents himself with cooperation for producers, profit-sharing for labourers, and a minimum wage fixed by law. His principal works are De la répartition des richesses et de la justice distributive (1846), a critical explanation of the doctrines of the liberal school and those of the principal French socialists, interesting even at the present day; and Vivre en travaillant (1848). C. G. While In his works, as in those of his contemporary PECQUEUR-both now nearly forgotten - the principal doctrines of collectivism are clearly expressed and reduced to formulas; among these are the so-called "iron law" of wages, the theory that wealth is the produce of the work "of others" (d'autrui), and that economic evolution leads infallibly to the socialisation of the land and of capital. J. K. I. VICTUAL BRETHREN. These were privateering organisation formed under the patronage of the HANSEATIC LEAGUE in their wars with Waldemar of Denmark. On the restoration of peace the freebooters turned their hand against every one, and though as a federation they soon ceased to exist, the North Sea and Baltic were in a state approaching anarchy until nearly the end of the 15th century. From this disturbed state of affairs England reaped much good. For the HANSARDS claimed the commercial monopoly of the Baltic, and Denmark of Iceland, and just as their power began to wane, the attacks of the Victual Brethren gave the English an excuse for reprisals. The coasts of England were continually ravaged by the North Sea pirates; Scarborough, Sandwich, and Southampton were pillaged and burned; London and Norwich had to defend themselves. Many English ships were captured by freebooters and the inhabitants of the coast lived in fear of kidnappers. Of course reprisals were made, and now and again a payment settled the claims of England and some HANSE TOWNS upon each other. However the outcome of all this anarchy was in favour of England. Through the quarrel of Denmark and the Hansards she had gained a foothold in the Baltic, and the EASTLAND COMPANY was formed to trade with the Teutonic Knights. Regardless of INTERNATIONAL LAW, English ships carried on a clandestine trade with Iceland in furs and fish, and, in spite of reprisals, persisted in it. Moreover the need of combination forced England to realise the VIGANO, FRANCESCO (1807-1891), was born at Cigognola (Como); died at Milan. In 1828 he was exiled by the Austrian government and travelled abroad for many years. in Paris he joined the Saint Simonians (see SAINT SIMON); later on he supported Mazzini, and conspired with him in Italy. For thirty years Vigano taught commercial science at the technical high school in Milan. After 1843 he devoted himself entirely to promoting international peace and the extension of co-operative societies, devoting himself to the cause enthusiastically and untiringly until his death, not only by words, but by giving up his fortune and by writing numerous works on the subject-many were translated into different languages. The two most important are: La fratellanza umana, 1873 (translated into French).-Le banche popolari, 2nd ed., 1875. U. R. VILLAGE COMMUNITIES. In theory "an organised self-acting group of . . . families exercising a common proprietorship over a definite tract of land (Maine)"; but setting aside for the moment this and other dicta, and not stopping to discuss side-issues respecting the MANOB 622 VILLAGE COMMUNITIES (q.v.), it may be said that a village community of the kind met with in England in the 11th century consisted of a body of men of various degrees of personal freedom, cultivating, by cooperative industry, open fields which chiefly belonged to a lord. Some were free and owned the acre strips they ploughed; some were in a modified state of bondage, and held their land by the render of agricultural services (see SERVICES, PREDIAL AND MILITARY); and a small and fastdiminishing number of others were in absolute slavery to a lord who owned both them and the bulk of the land his group of peasants were cultivating (see VILLANUS and SERVUS). The village was a cluster of cottages, often gathered closely round a church, and contained not only the cultivators and their REEVE (q.v.), but the smiths, carpenters, tilers, and others whose labour was essential towards rendering the village completely self-sufficing in an economic sense, and whose work at forge or bench was repaid by a settled share of the results of cultivation. A walk through the flat country westward of Bruges, or a railway journey between Aix-laChapelle and Cologne, will show the lineal representatives of similar village clusters in the midst of hedgeless, houseless, stretches of open country which the present inhabitants of each cluster are tilling. Sight will not make us too readily aware of the exchange of produce for money which now goes on, or of the irrevocable change in personal status which has taken place in the course of centuries, but we may accept the assistance of external forms and realise from them what a true village community must once have been. In races which tend towards improvement, blood-relationships and the social instincts of man would suffice to congregate the humbler elements of a population engaged in field labour into such village communities as those described; but external forces might have the same result, and thus many questions arise on the history of these groups. Were village communities really primitive institutions? Did they start as free or unfree? If the manorial system was superinduced so as to form an external shell to the village community, when and how did it happen? What was the relation of the village community to the tribal system with its constant redistributions of land? Is it true that "joint-ownership, and not separate ownership, is the really archaic institution"? But the answers as yet given to these and other queries do not resolve all doubts. Setting aside writers like G. L. Gomme, who draws evidence from the Russian MIR (q.v.) and the customs of Fiji, F. SEEBOHM's English Village Community deserves early and careful attention. With respect to England, Seebohm states his conclusion that there have always been two rural systems, the tribal community in the west, and the village community in the east, each connected with its own special form of open-field cultivation. Both he believes to have been pre-Roman. The village community in eastern England was connected with a settled agriculture which was apparently Improved during the Roman occupation, and was | carried on under the THREE-FIELD form of the open-field system, which became the shell of the village community. The quality of the holdings, and the succession of a single tenant which preserved it, were signs, not of an original allodial allotment on the German MARK SYSTEM, but of a settled SERFDOM under lordship, each tenant having but the user of the land at the will of the lord. This serfdom, Seebohm thinks, was to the masses of the population not a degradation, but a rise from a once more general slavery. In western England he sees the tribal community, of a pastoral rather than an agricultural type, bound together by ties of blood-relationship and further distinguished by the redistribution of lands (see TRIBAL SYSTEM). The manorial system, however, was not, Seebolim thinks, a mere development from the German tribal system described by TACITUS. There was a Roman element in it, derived from the villa with its coloni, tributarii, and slaves working under the villicus, and the manorial estate became the predominant form of land ownership in what had once been Roman provinces on the continent. Thus the German successors of Roman lords of villas became in turn manorial lords, whilst the coloni and others remaining on the land apparently became, "with scarcely a visible change, a community of serfs." He thinks that Pliny's words (Nat. Hist., xvii. 4) as to Belgic Britain indicate a one-field system, and that the three-course rotation of crops was introduced by the Roman conquerors, so that the open fields round the villa of the Roman lord, cultivated by his coloni, tributarii, liti, and slaves, may have been at once arranged on the three-field system. Indeed he quotes from Siculus Flaccus (Lachmann, p. 152) the case of possessores who do not own continuas terras, sed particulas quasdam in diversis locis, intervenientibus complurium possessionibus, "words which amount to a partial description of the open-field system." Like many other students of history, Seebohm disbelieves in the total obliteration of the Romanised Briton, and thinks that, taking England as a whole, the continuity between the Roman and English system of land management was not really broken, and that the earlier "hams" and "tuns" of Ethelbert's laws were undoubtedly manors. The theories included under the mark system of the Germanists have been vigorously attacked by FUSTEL DE COULANGES, who considered that he had swept away all historical basis from them, leaving primitive communism as au unproved possibility. Certainly he has shown that the word marca in early German law does not mean an area of land held in common, but primarily a boundary or frontier, and, in a derivative sense, the private property which it surrounds. He has shown furthermore that a blunder with respect to a worl in an ancient deed, anales for ariales, led Maurer to believe in the periodical redistribution of village lands. To this writer's Origin of Property in Land, Professor Ashley has prefixed a valuable chapter on the English manor in which he argues from Cæsar (Bell. Gall., v. 14) that the village community did not exist among the Britons, as "most of those in the interior sow no corn, but live on flesh and milk." Further than this, in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales the early population VILLAGE COMMUNITIES was mainly pastoral, and there is no trace of the village community among them. On the other hand it appears from Tacitus (Agricola, xix.) that Britain had become a corn-growing country, and later, from Zosimus, that in A.D. 360 Julian fetched corn from thence in 800 vessels. from the Theodosian code (xi. tit. vii. 2) and We know too Ammianus, xxvii. 8. 7, that there were coloni and tributarii in England in A.D. 319-368. In other words the very classes of free, or imperfectly free, cultivators which were characteristic of the Roman villa were actually working in Britain under their Roman designations, and the existing traces of Roman occupation in rural districts are eloquent as to all that remains to be proved as regards the presence of the true villa and its personnel. These cultivators were reinforced by imported bodies of conquered barbarians who, as De Coulanges shows (Recherches sur quelques problèmes d'histoire, p. 43), became not PEASANT PROPRIETORS but tenants bound to the soil. The manor of continental Europe was the continuation of the villa of the Roman domination, and the features of the English manor run so closely parallel to those of manors across the sea that it is scarcely possible to doubt that in the English medieval manor we have the Roman villa slightly modified by the Teutonic invasion. Vinogradoff's important work on Villainage in England presents us with very cautious views. "The communal organisation of the peasantry," he says, "is more ancient and more deeply laid than the manorial order." open-field system is so strange and inconvenient He argues that the when viewed from the standpoint of private ownership, and so natural and convenient when regarded as a communal system, that it must be of the latter character. But apparently against this conclusion there stands the fact that there are three main sizes of holding, the VIRGATE, bovate, and cotland, and the further fact that these holdings are indivisible and are not varied according to the size of the families that have to subsist on them. These he interprets as signs that the institution is in a state of transition, and is distorted from its original shape. This distortion is due to the manor. rigidity of the holdings would, from a communal The point of view, be unjust, but from a manorial standpoint extremely convenient for keeping intact the working units of service. And yet the holdings are not formed for manorial purposes, for they depend upon another element. quarter of a hide because two oxen, the normal The virgate is one equipment of the virgatarius, form one fourth of the great plough-team of eight oxen. was thus parcelled out in units of oxen, and could The land not be divided because the ox could not. So we have in the scattered acre strips a trace of communal allotment, though no such redivision of the arable any longer occurs. In the treatment of meadow and waste we see, however, the former annually redistributed by lot, and the latter measured out by limitations of the number of animals that may be sent into it; and these are obviously communal methods of procedure. The manor Vinogradoff regards as consisting of two elements, the peasant village and the demesne cultivated by its help, and he views the manor as 623 In of gradual growth and comparatively recent origin. He cites the PRESTATION-fowls, cheese, etc., sent to the lord, often at a distance-and the firma unius noctis, paid by a village to the king's household, as traces of something preceding the manorial system,-signs, indeed, of a former great over-lord exacting tribute from a village community, rather than a lesser lord close at hand cultivating land by the help of his peasantry. Another sign of the same he sees in those cases in which the DEMESNE consists of acre strips scattered among the rest in such a way that all is cultivated at one operation, farm to work on stated days. This he interprets and the villagers are not called up to the demesne as something intermediate between the tribute paid to a great over-lord by a practically self-dependent community, and the full manorial system. further sign of transition he cites the fact that in As a the earlier records few manorial officers appear, but in the later a large class of "sergeants.' early days the gathering of tribute for an over-lord and the supervision of a few manorial services did not need so great a staff of intermediaries. A further point against those who argue for an original servile community is the constant presence of freeholders (see FREEHOLD, HISTORICAL) who only do slight services, but yet are full members of the village group; and the manorial court furnishes another argument for their presence and effective influence, for servile suitors could never by them. selves have acquired the position of judges in litigation. COMMUNE), and custom and self-government prevail Furthermore the transfer of land is effected by an appeal to communal testimony (see over attempts at capricious change. Everywhere, even during the feudal period, Vinogradoff finds traces remaining of a peasant class which formerly lived and worked in self-dependent communities, paying tribute to and owning the general authority of a great over-lord, "whose claims may be political give rise to the manorial connection between estate and affect the semblance of ownership, but do not and village." These cautious words do not exclude the idea that the manor is due to the Roman occupation, community was a mixture of free and unfree and they permit the view that the early village elements. the best claim to public attention at present. The The above are the theories which appear to have older notions, which are generally discarded, are amply set forth under MARK SYSTEM. study of the results of the Teutonic conquest on Unbiassed the Romano-British population may lead to settled ideas as regards England. undoubtedly laid by such writers as Freeman on Too great stress is extreme expressions used by the chroniclers. The city of Bath, to take an entirely unnoticed example, was captured from the Britons by Ceawlin in 577, and was "destroyed" by the Normans in 1088, and yet the Gesta Stephani (Rolls ed., 37, 38) describe the "arched chambers" of the Roman baths as the resort of invalids and loungers in the year 1138. It is clear that the heathen Saxons who would spare Roman baths might attach some value to Roman agriculture, and might retain, at least as slaves, communities of cultivators who could grow corn in plenty for their use (see SERVUS). |