[1] Political philosophy has much to say in favour of laws and institutions, at certain periods of a nation's growth, for encouraging, or at least permitting, the disposition of its members to found families, to be maintained by hereditary possessions in land. Yet, if this disposition be not kept within bounds, those who are influenced by it will "join house to house, and field to field, till there be no place;" till the race of small landholders, yeomen, and partly independent tenants, is swallowed up by a few rich despots. To prevent this evil among the Hebrews, Moses directed as equal a division of the land as possible in the first instance, among the 600,000 families who originally formed the nation; and provided against the permanent alienation of any estate, by giving a right of repurchase to the seller and his relations, and of repossession without purchase at the Jubilee. The story of Naboth illustrates the effect of these laws in forming an order of sturdy, independent yeomen; but it must also be taken as an instance of the habitual breach of the same laws by the rich and powerful (cf. Micah ii.; Neh. v. 1-13; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 21); as they in like manner disobeyed that respecting the liberation of slaves at the Jubilee (Jer. xxxvi. 8-16). In England, where the Norman conquest accumulated all the land in the hands of a few nobles, the like accumulation has been opposed--however imperfectly--by laws in their form exactly opposite to those of Moses; by the permission to cut off old entails, and the prohibition to make new ones except for one generation, and by allowing land to be bought and sold like other commodities.--_Strachey,_ pp. 65, 66. [2] The covetous man is like a spider. As in this, that he does nothing but lay his nets to catch every fly, gaping only for a booty of gain. So yet more, in that while he makes nets for these flies, he consumes his own bowels; so that which is his life is his death. If there be any creature miserable, it be he; and yet he is least to be pitied, because he makes himself miserable. Such as he is I will account him; and will therefore sweep down his webs, and hate his poison.--_Hall,_ 1574-1656. Covetous worldlings will hardly spare the poor some of their fire to warm them, some of their water to drink, some of their ground to lodge on, though it were no more hurt to them than the lighting of a candle at their torch.--_Adams,_ 1653.