[Sidenote: Law] The legal theory is that property exists because the law says it shall. This expresses a truth, but is no more than a truism. The law determines the limits of property, but what determines the limits of the law? What practical or social justification is there for passing and continuing such law? The legal theory does not explain anything finally. Each of these theories has its defects, but each points to some fact important and significant, at certain times and places, in the explanation of this widespread institution. [Sidenote: Property in early societies] 3. _The institution of private property has evolved under diverse conditions; the question of its origin is not the same as that of its present justification._ In early societies individual property rights were not very clearly marked. Every tribe asserted against other tribes, and tried to uphold, by war, its claims upon its customary hunting-grounds; but the claims of the individual hunter and fisher within the tribe did not often come into conflict. Private property at the outset was in personal possessions, ornaments, weapons, utensils, which were very meager in that primitive society where it was the custom "to go calling with a club instead of a card-case." Only later came individual property in land. A few years ago it was generally believed that the organization of the old German tribes was politically an almost perfect democracy, and economically a communism wherein all had equal claims on the land. To-day this opinion is very seriously questioned. It seems probable that the so-called communism was really an oligarchy of the favored, and that the masses lived in subjection, cut off from all but a meager share in the public property. [Sidenote: Origin vs. present justification of property] However that may have been, strong forces within historic times have put an end to the common ownership and tillage of land as it existed among the serfs of Europe. The common tillage of land was shown by experience to be wasteful. Not only did competition tend to bring the economic agents into more efficient hands, but the movement was furthered by many acts of injustice and violence on the part of those in power. Inquiries into the origin and development of this social institution are interesting and helpful in forming an estimate of its present significance, but the problems of the past are not those of to-day. Whether or not the ancient beginning of property in Europe was in violence and evil has but a remote bearing on the question as to the present working of it. Social conditions and needs have not changed more than have the forms and limits of property itself. Each generation has its own problems to solve, and each must test existing institutions by their present results, ignoring for the most part the evils of the past. [Sidenote: Social expediency the ground of private property] [Sidenote: Shifting limits of the law of property]