During the last forty years a theory has made its way into historical literature, according to which private ownership in land was preceded by a system of cultivation in common. The authors of this theory do not confine themselves to saying that there was no such thing as private property in land among mankind when in a primitive or savage state. It is obvious that when men were still in the hunting or pastoral stage, and had not yet arrived at the idea of agriculture, it did not occur to them to take each for himself a share of the land. The theory of which I speak applies to settled and agricultural societies. It asserts that among peoples that had got so far as to till the soil in an orderly fashion, common ownership of land was still maintained; that for a long time it never occurred to these men who ploughed, sowed, reaped and planted, to appropriate to themselves the ground upon which they laboured. They only looked upon it as belonging to the community. It was the people that at first was the sole owner of the entire territory, either cultivating it in common, or making a fresh division of it every year. It was only later that the right of property, which was at first attached to the whole people, came to be associated with the village, the family, the individual. “All land in the beginning was common land,” says Maurer, “and belonged to all; that is to say to the people.”[51] “Land was held in common,” says M. Viollet, “before it became private property in the hands of a family or an individual.”[52] “The arable land was cultivated in common,” says M. de Laveleye; “private property grew up afterwards out of this ancient common ownership.”[53] In a word, the system of agriculture was, in the beginning, an agrarian communism. This theory is not, strictly speaking, a new one. Long before the present century, there were thinkers who loved to picture to themselves mankind living together, when society was first formed, in a fraternal communism. What is new in this, what is peculiar to our own times, is the attempt to rest this theory on a foundation of historical fact, to support it with quotations from historical documents, to deck it out, so to speak, in a learned dress. I do not wish to combat the theory. What I want to do is only to examine the authorities on which it has been based. I intend simply to take _all_ these authorities, as they are presented to us by the authors of the system, and to verify them. The object of this cold and tedious procedure is not that of proving whether the theory is true or false; it is only to discover whether the authorities that have been quoted can be fairly regarded as appropriate. In short, I am going to discuss not the theory itself, but the garb of learning in which it has been presented. [51] G. L. von Maurer, _Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark- Hof- Dorf- und Stadtverfassung_, 1854, p. 93. [52] P. Viollet, in the _Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes_, 1872, p. 503.