Nasse's pamphlet is based on a careful study of authorities, and despite its shortness must be treated as a work of scientific research. But if all subsequent workers have to reckon with it in settling particular questions, general conceptions have been more widely influenced by Sir Henry Maine's lectures, which did not aim at research, and had in view the broad aspects of the subject. Their peculiar method is well known to be that of comparing facts from very different environments--from the Teutonic, the Celtic, the Hindu world; Maine tries to sketch a general process where other people only see particular connexions and special reasons. The chapters which fall within the line of our inquiry are based chiefly on a comparison between Western Europe and India. The agrarian organisation of many parts of India presents at this very day, in full work and in all stages of growth and decay, the village community of which some traces are still scattered in the records of Europe. There and here the process is in the main the same, the passage from collective ownership to individualism is influenced by the same great forces, notwithstanding all the differences of time and place. The original form of agrarian arrangement is due to the settlement of a group of free men, which surrenders to its individual members the use of arable land, meadows, pasture and wood, but retains the ownership and the power to control and modify the rights of using the common land. There can be no doubt that the legal theory, which sees in the modern rights of commoners mere encroachments upon the lord, carries feudal notions back into too early a period. The real question as conceived by Maine is this--By what means was the free village community turned into the manor of the lord? The petty struggles between townships must have led to the subjugation of some groups by others; in each particular village the headman had the means to use his authority in order to improve his material position; and when a family contrived to retain an office in the hands of its members this at once gave matters an aristocratical turn. In Western Europe external causes had to account for a great deal in the gradual rise of territorial lordship. When the barbarian invaders came into contact with Roman civilisation and took possession of the provincial soil, they found private ownership and great property in full development, and naturally fell under the influence of these accomplished facts; their village community was broken up and transformed gradually into the manorial system[27].