Reckoning the feudal lord, and all other overlords who had the same control over land, as private proprietors, we may say that in historical times the arable land of every country has been owned by a minority of the population. Since the downfall of feudalism, the tendency in most regions of the Western world has been toward an increase in the number of owners, and a decrease in the number of great estates. This tendency has been especially marked during the last one hundred years. It will, however, need to continue for a very long time, or else to increase its pace very rapidly, before land ownership will be diffused in anything like the measure that is necessary if its benefits are to be shared by all the people. Even in the United States, where the distribution is perhaps more general than in any other country, only 38.4 per cent. of the families in towns and cities owned, in 1910, the homes in which they lived, and therefore the land upon which their homes were located. In the rural districts the per cent. of home-owning families was only 62.8. _Conclusions from History_ What conclusions does history warrant concerning the social and moral value of private landownership? Here we are on very uncertain ground; for different inferences may be drawn from the same group of facts if a different section of them be selected for emphasis. Sir Henry Maine and Henry George both accepted the theory of primitive agrarian communism, but the former saw in this assumed fact a proof that common ownership was suited only to the needs of rude and undeveloped peoples, while the latter regarded it as a sure indication that common ownership was fundamentally natural and in accordance with permanent social welfare. The fact that practically all peoples whose history we know discarded communal for private ownership as soon as they had acquired a moderate degree of proficiency in methods of cultivation and in the arts of civilised life does, indeed, create a presumption that the latter system is the better for civilised men. To this extent Sir Henry Maine is right. Against this presumption Henry George maintained that common ownership was abandoned solely because of the usurpation, fraud, and force employed by the powerful and privileged classes. Undoubtedly this factor played a great part in bringing about the private ownership that has existed and still exists, but it does not account for the institution as a whole and everywhere. If chiefs, kings, and other powerful personages had never usurped control of the land, if no people had ever conquered the territory of another, it is probable that private ownership would have taken place to the same extent, although it would have been much more widely diffused. For the system of periodical repartition of land, to say nothing of communal cultivation and communal distribution of the product, does hinder that attachment to a particular portion of the soil and that intensive