the hands of the victors in any raid. The loot may be goods, cattle if any, or men, women and children; any or all of which may become (private) property and be accumulated in sufficient mass to make a difference between rich and poor. Captives may fall into some form of servitude, and in an agricultural community may easily become the chief item of wealth. At the same time an entire community may be reduced to servitude, so falling into the possession of an absentee owner (master), or under resident masters coming in from the victorious enemy. In any or all of these ways the institution of ownership is likely to arise so soon as there is provocation for it, and in all cases it is a consequence of an appreciable advance in the industrial arts. Yet in a number of recorded cases a sufficient advance in technology does not appear to have been followed by so prompt an introduction of ownership, at least not in the fully developed form, as the surface facts would seem to have called for. Custom in the lower cultures is extremely tenacious, and what might seem an excessive allowance of time appears to be needed for so radical an innovation in the habitual scheme of things as is involved in the installation of rights of ownership. There are cases of a fairly advanced barbarian culture, with sufficiently coercive government control, an authoritative priesthood, and well-marked class distinctions which hold good both in economic and social relations, and yet where the line of demarcation between ownership and mastery is not drawn in any unambiguous fashion--where it is perhaps as accurate a statement as the case permits, to say that this distinction has not yet been made, and so would, if applied, mark a difference that does not yet exist.[102] So long as overt predatory conditions continue to rule the case,--e. g., so long as the community in question continues, in a sense, under martial law, “in a state of seige,” where the holders of the economic advantage hold it on a tenure of prowess or by way of delegated power and prerogative from a superior of warlike antecedents and dynastic right,--so long the rights of ownership are not likely to be well differentiated from those of mastery. Much the same characterisation of such a state of things is conveyed in the current phrase that “the rights of person and property are not secure.” The very wide prevalence in the barbarian cultures of some such state of things argues that the genesis of property rights is likely to have been something of this kind in the common run, though it does not in other cases preclude a different and more peaceable development out of workmanlike or priestly economies.