Yet even in France the migration by no means takes place on such a scale, or with such facility, as nearly to equalize wages; and in the places from which it is greatest, the department or the Creuse and the province of Auvergne, the main cause is not pecuniary interest. The younger brother in Auvergne goes from his home to a distant city in obedience to traditional family sentiments; and the peasant goes from the Creuse to Paris as a mason, not because he has calculated the difference of earnings in the two places, and in different employments (for he could make more in many cases by remaining at home), but because his father went to Paris before him, and his comrades do so around him. The relation of the economic phenomena of society to its moral, intellectual, and political condition is undreamt of by the old school of economists. Even in the case of men, it is manifestly vain to look for an explanation of the causes which determine the economic condition either of individuals or of classes, without reference to laws, customs, moral and religious sentiment; how much more is it so in the case of women? Let me adduce one instance, showing how, even in the smallest details, the economic structure of society, as regards the occupations and earnings of women, is influenced by moral and other causes, quite apart from individual pecuniary interest. At a hotel in Clermont-Ferrand, in which, as is commonly the case in large French hotels, a man does the work of housemaid, a Swiss visitor remarked to me lately, that you will rarely find perfect cleanliness and neatness where such is the case; yet in France, he added, 'it is a necessary evil. A young or goodlooking housemaid has no chance of keeping her character in a French hotel; in Switzerland she is as safe as in a church.' I answered that possibly she might be as safe in the mountains of Auvergne as of Switzerland; for climate is certainly one of the causes which produce a difference in this respect between French and Swiss morals. Other causes too might be assigned, but I refer here to the moral difference in question only as exhibiting the influence of moral causes on the economic structure of society down to

the minutest details.

There is another subject on which the social and economic phenomena of Auvergne may be seen to throw considerable light, namely, the mode in which diversities of human character and life are produced, and the real origin of differences of national character, customs, and condition, which are vulgarly attributed to difference of race,-that is to say, to ancestral and inherited differences of physical and mental constitution. Greater differences of human life, motive, and pursuit are to be found in parts of the province of Auvergne, a few miles from each other-in adjacent districts of mountain and plain, for example-than some which are often pointed to between Frenchman and Englishman as the consequences of an original difference of race. The people of every country like to be told that they possess an inherent superiority to every other, and the doctrine of race flatters every race and every nation. The Englishman, the Frenchman, the German, the Spaniard, the Jew, above all the Chinaman, each thinks himself of a superior race. When we descend from nations to smaller divisions of mankind, to provinces for example, the same claim is commonly set up by each to superiority over the other divisions. An Auvergnat lately asked me if I did not observe that the Auvergnats were a finer and more vigorous race than the rest of Frenchmen, and the question reminded me that a Comtois once asked me the very same question in favour of the men of his own province, la Franche Comté. Divide provinces into departments or counties, and one finds that county pride can soar quite as high as provincial or national pride. Descend further from counties to yet smaller divisions, to villages for instance, and you will find neighbouring villages in Germany with a profound contempt for each other, and an exalted consciousness of their own hereditary superiority. Take still minuter groups, and you may discover in every country many thousands of families, in all ranks of life, the members of each of which believe that they come of a better stock, and possess finer natural qualities than their neighbours. From the family come down to the individual, and the real root of the popular doctrine of race in all its forms is reached, being no other than individual conceit. The doctrine of race not only

does not solve the problems which really arise respecting national diversities of character, career, and condition, but prevents those problems from being even raised. And it is impossible to acquit a dogmatic school of economists of all blame in respect of the ignorance of ascertainable causes of social diversities which the vulgar theory of race exhibits. The method of abstract reasoning from crude assumption, in place of careful investigation of economic phenomena and their causes, has prevented the discovery of a mass of evidence respecting the real origin of differences in the aims, qualities, and circumstances of mankind in different countries and situations, such as the mountain and the plain of Auvergne for example, upon which a true theory of the causes of the diversities commonly attributed to race, might have been built.

XXVIII.

M. DE LAVELEYE ON PRIMITIVE PROPERTY.*

M. DE LAVELEYE'S present work has two distinct aspects, historical and practical. On the one hand, it investigates the early forms of landed property in a number of societies, European, Asiatic, African, and American. On the other hand, it raises a practical problem, the importance of which will be admitted by readers who may dissent from M. de Laveleye's views with respect to its solution. A study of the course followed by the development of property from the infancy of society has led to two opposite lines of inference and thoughtrepresented respectively by Sir Henry Maine and M. de Laveleye with regard to its present forms in most civilized countries; but the historical researches of both these eminent writers coincide in establishing that the separate ownership of land is of modern growth, and that originally the soil belonged in common to communities of kinsmen.

The property of which M. de Laveleye treats in this volume is property in land; of all kinds of property that which has most deeply affected both the economic condition and the political career of human societies. In one sense indeed land was not primitive property; it was not man's earliest possession or wealth. The first forms of property are lost in the mist that surrounds the first infant steps of the human race. Wild herbs, fruit, berries, and roots were probably the earliest acquisitions, but the food thus obtained was, doubtless, devoured at once. When at length providence was developed so far as to lead to the laying by of some sustenance for the future,

* This Essay formed an Introduction to the English edition of M. de Laveleye's Primitive Property, published at the beginning of last year by Messrs. Macmillan and Co., and is reproduced here with their permission.

the inference to which the earliest developments of movable wealth of which we get glimpses, unmistakably point, is that the store which individuals might thus accumulate would not have been regarded as their own absolute property, but as part of the common fund of the community, larger or smaller according to circumstances, of which they were members. Before land had been definitely appropriated by tribes or smaller groups, movables of many sorts had been successively added to the stock of human possessions-new descriptions of food, implements and weapons, ornaments, the rudiments of clothing, fuel, captured and domesticated animals, human slaves, vehicles, boats, tents, and other movable dwellings. The importance of some of these early kinds of property to the progress of mankind is illustrated by the probability that the domestication of animals, and the acquisition thereby of a constant supply of animal food, contributed more than any other agency to the cessation of cannibalism. And a mass of evidence converges to the conclusion that the chief of these various chattels were possessed in co-ownership by families or larger communities, held together by blood or affinity. The bearing of this proposition on the nature of the ownership of land in early societies is obvious, and it has also a relation to the practical aspects of the subject which M. de Laveleye discusses. Some evidence in support of it may therefore be appropriately adduced in the present Introduction; the more so that an opinion seems to prevail, even among scholars familiar with the true beginnings of property in land, that movable property in primitive society belonged from the first to individuals.

In the ancient laws of Ireland the whole tribe has both 'live chattels' and 'dead chattels.' Among the Eskimos of Greenland, according to Dr. Rink's account of their ancient usages, a house was the joint property of several families; a tent, a boat, and a stock of household utensils and articles for barter were owned in common by one or more families; the flesh and blubber of captured scals belonged to a whole hamlet, while larger animals such as whales were shared among the inhabitants of neighbouring hamlets; and custom strictly limited the quantity