also the absence of all the alleged indications of the existence of the thing. The second line of defence is the evidence of “comparative custom.” India, at any rate, it is urged, displays the village community: there we may see, crystallised by the force of custom, conditions which in Europe have long since passed away. Now it is, of course, true that the village is “the unit of all revenue arrangements in India;”[8] that, over large districts, cultivation is carried on by village groups; and that in some provinces, notably the Punjab, this village group is at present recognised as the joint owner of the village lands. But it is a long step from this to the proposition that “the oldest discoverable forms of property in land,” in India, “were forms of collective property;”[9] and that all existing rights of private ownership have arisen from the break-up or depression of the original communities. The truth is, that of late years Indian facts have been looked at almost exclusively through the spectacles of European theory. Now that the mark is receding into improbability, it is urgently to be desired that Indian economic history should be looked at for what it will itself reveal.[10] It would be unwise to anticipate the results of such an investigation. But there is one preliminary caution to be expressed; we must take care not to exaggerate the force of custom. Professor Marshall, in his recent great work, has indicated some of the reasons for believing that custom is by no means so strong in India as is generally supposed;[11] and it is to be hoped that he will see his way to publishing the not-inconsiderable mass of evidence that he has accumulated. As to supposed analogies with the mark in the practices of other peoples, all that can be said at this stage is that most of them prove only a joint-cultivation and not a joint-ownership. Thus, the Russian _mir_, which is often referred to in this connection, has always in historical times been a village group in serfdom under a lord: the decree of Boris Godounoff, frequently spoken of as the origin of serfdom, in that it tied the cultivators to the soil, may much more readily be explained as an attempt to hinder a movement towards freedom. It was indeed in all probability a measure somewhat similar in character to the English “statutes of labourers.”[12] With regard to the various more or less savage peoples, who are said to live under a system of common village ownership, the bulk of the evidence is, as M. Fustel observes, of the most unsubstantial character. There are lessons in the work of M. Emile de Laveleye which M. Fustel fails to recognise; and to these we shall return; but to the main proposition which it was intended to prove, M. de Laveleye’s book can hardly be regarded as adding much strength.