Where a somewhat widely diffused private ownership succeeded the primitive system, it was probably due to the free action of the cultivators, as soon as they came to realise the inconveniences of ownership in common. "Any enclosed land round their permanent dwellings, and any land outside the settlement which was cleared, reclaimed, and cultivated, or occupied with cattle by individuals or families, was recognised as their personal property. Only those who were industrious, enterprising, and courageous enough would clear, occupy, retain, cultivate, and defend waste land. They would become personal owners of cattle, and would gradually acquire wealth which would enable them to employ others and still further improve their position. As their power increased, and as population grew, the bravest, wealthiest, and most capable fighting men amongst them would become chiefs or a species of nobles, and the force of circumstances, often no doubt aided by force and fraud, would eventually make them the landowners of the greater part of the district, with the more or less willing acquiescence and consent of the community amongst whom they lived, and to whom they extended their protection."[6] _Limited Character of Primitive Common Ownership_ A great deal of the opposition to the theory of primitive common ownership of agricultural land, seems to be based upon an exaggerated conception of the scope of that institution. The average man who thinks or speaks of ownership to-day has in mind the Roman concept and practice of private property. This includes the unrestricted right of disposal; that is, the power to hold permanently, to transfer or transmit, to use or to abuse or not to use at all, to retain the product of the owner's use, to rent the property to any person and for any period that the owner chooses, and to obtain a price in return called rent. Any man who takes the theory of primitive common ownership to imply that the community or tribe exercised all these powers over its land, will have no difficulty in proving that the evidence is overwhelmingly against any such theory. Even among those people that are certainly known to have practised so-called common ownership of land, there are very few instances of communal cultivation, or communal distribution of the product. Yet these are included in the Roman concept of ownership. The usual method seems to have been periodical allotment by the community of the land among individuals, individual cultivation of the allotted tracts, and individual ownership of the product. Moreover, there was always a chief or patriarch who exercised considerable authority in the distribution of the land, frequently collected a rent or tax from the cultivators, and almost invariably exercised something like private ownership of a portion of the land for his direct and special benefit. Sometimes other men of importance in the community possessed land which was not subject to the communal allotment. Primitive ownership