Meyer (ii, 519) pronounces that the plot of two yokes was, "of course, no farm, but a kitchen-garden," adding: "It is also the personal land of the small farmers and day-labourers who look after the lands of the large landholders, not the original private holding in contrast to the mark belonging in common to the _gens_ (_Geschlecht_) or commune (_Gauverband_)." But on the previous page Meyer says that "the land was settled not by the _gentes_, but communally (_genossenschaftlich_) by unions of equal freemen." If these, then, were the _curiæ_ (the Mark, says Meyer in this connection, did _not_ belong to the _gentes_), they did not include the plebs; and we come back to the datum that the free plebeian had no means of support save his five roods and what beasts he had on the public pasture. The pasture-land, again, is surmised by Mommsen (ch. xiii, p. 201) to have been small in area relatively to the arable-land communally owned and cultivated by the _gentes_ or clans--a proposition irreconcilable with the evidence as to the quantity of cattle. As to the two yokes of land, Schwegler decides (i, 618) that it was "nowise inadequate" as arable-land, in view of the extraordinary fruitfulness of Italy, and, further, of the circumstance that "the free burghers had also the use of the common land" (for pasture). We are to remember that Italian land could yield two crops in a year. (Niebuhr, _Lebensnachrichten_, ii, 245, cited by Schwegler.) On the general problem as to why or how the land once communally tilled ceased to be so, we have still no better light than the old generalisation of Hobbes in reply to his own question: "Upon what impulsives, when all was equally every man's in common, men did rather think it fitting that every man should have his inclosure?" "I found," he puts it, "that from a community of goods there must needs arise contention whose enjoyment should be greatest, and from that contention all kind of calamities must unavoidably ensue." [Epistle Dedicatory to _Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Civil Society_ (translation of _De Cive_), 1651. Cp. Goldwin Smith, _The United States_, 1893, p. 23.]