out from the white oak; just as sacred as my right to the boat which I hollowed out from the forest tree, or the bark hut, or the hut of skins, which my labor erected to shelter me and my family. The doctrinaire asks: “Could he not be as secure in his possession if the land were owned and exaction made by all the people?” Certainly. That is my contention. The whole tribe _did_ exercise dominion over the land, but to encourage the individual member of the tribe to improve a particular portion of the wild land, the tribe agreed to protect the individual in that which his labor had created, namely a _farm_. My contention now is that the ultimate ownership of the land is in all the people; but society had a perfect right to divide it on such terms as were thought best and to guarantee to each individual “security of possession,” or _title_, to that which he had produced. The great trouble with Mr. Doctrinaire is that he does not begin at the beginning. If he would study the condition of the human race as it gradually evolved from the patriarchal state, the tribal state, the nomad state, into that fixed and complex status which we now call “Christian Civilization,” he would readily understand how private ownership of land was the axis upon which the improvement of the conditions of the individual and of the State turned. As long as tribes wandered about from province to province, with their herds of goats, or sheep, or cattle, nibbling the grass which nature put up, and moving onward to another pasture as fast as one was exhausted, there could be nothing but tent life, nothing but personal property. The house had to move every time the family moved. Therefore, when the herds devoured the grass in one place, and the tribe had to move to another, tents were struck, the few household goods were packed on the backs of the wives, or on the backs of other beasts of burden, and the family moved. When man and beast multiplied to such an extent that nature no longer supplied a sufficiency of food, it became necessary for the tribe to settle down, and to divide the territory upon which they settled among the various members of the tribe. That was done in Germany, as well as in various other countries, but I take Germany because the German tribes were our own ancestors. They divided the lands every year. It was seldom the case that the same tribesman occupied the same home for more than one year. Like the Methodist preachers of today, their homes were always on the go. The farmer’s home in those days was precisely like the Methodist preachers’ homes today—a matter to be fixed at the annual conference. The Methodist preacher who today is preaching in the town may next year be sent into the remote rural precincts: the mountain parson may next year be sent to the seaboard. The church is fixed and the parsonage is stationary, but the preacher and his wife and his children are forever moving. Now in precisely the same manner the tribesmen of the German