army, and who are the constituents of this army and police? People, workingmen. When these laborers refuse to serve the unchristian and brutal commands of the governments, then people can divide and take as much land as they need for cultivation and their living. Should it not be robbery to take the possessions of people who accumulated them for hundreds and thousands of years? Yes, but how did these upper classes accumulate their property and riches? Tolstoy replies on this question together with his teacher Proudhon: They heaped up their properties by theft from other people. _La propriété c’est le vol_, said Proudhon[55]. _Sobstvenost est koren zla_ (Property is the root of evil), continues his disciple, by the same axiomatic language as the master[56]. Is this statement categorical? From the standpoint of Proudhon and Tolstoy it is, but from the point of view of economists this doctrine is at fault. The Russian iconoclast, Tolstoy, like the American advocate of Single Tax, George, maintains that the land question may be solved simply by restoration of the land to the people who work on it. This is, undoubtedly, the best, the easiest, and quickest way to make private property common and equitable, but what do history and economics say of this _quaestio vexata_. II It is not needful here to go with historians and jurists far beyond the Greek and Roman lawyers in this inquiry. Let us begin the discussion with Plato and Aristotle. We know already that Plato in his _Republic_ is a communist. He permits no citizen to have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary. The land is divided into equal parts among all the citizens, in order that all may be interested in the defence of the country[57]. This communism of Plato was vigorously combated by Aristotle in a brief passage of _The Politics_, which contains many of the best arguments since used on that side of the controversy[58]. However, Aristotle was not an exclusive individualist. He wants in a state, _Private property and common use_. In Plato’s judgment, the state should be governed in the reverse way, _Common property and private use_. In Greek history we find a constant struggle about these questions of inequality among people and private dominion of land. But the ideas of communism and social possessions among ancient nations are prevalent. The learned historian, Theo. Mommsen, in his _Roemische Geschichte_ stated that in the earliest times the arable land was cultivated in common, and it was not till later that land came to be distributed among the burgesses as their own property[59]. Mommsen’s thesis is based on the quotations of Cicero[60], Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch. In later time it is supported by the historian, P. Viollet[61], economist E. de Laveley[62], sociologists Ch. Letourneau[63], Sir Henry Main[64], and almost all socialist writers[65].