Mr. Doctrinaire makes the point that when one member of the tribe decided to undertake the arduous task of making a farm out of a few acres of the millions which belonged to the tribe, this industrious member of the community “robbed” all the others when he claimed as his own that which his hands had made. I can see no more “robbery” in this case than in that of another tribesman who went and cut down one of the millions of forest trees which belonged to the tribe, and with painful labor hollowed out this tree and created a canoe. At the time the one tribesman made the canoe, every other tribesman had the same chance to do the same thing. At the time the one tribesman went into the woods and made a farm every other tribesman had the same right. If Mr. Doctrinaire thinks that the first occupant of any particular spot did not have the right to locate a farm, he might as well say that the first finder of the cavern, or the hollow tree, did not have the right to occupy that which he had first found, and yet he knows perfectly well that this right of discovery and occupancy was always recognized from the beginning of time and that from the very nature of things it had to be recognized to prevent the bloodiest feuds in every tribe. (A curious survival of this Right of Discovery is to be seen even now in the claim to the “Bee Tree” by the first to find it.) Mr. Doctrinaire says, impliedly, that if the tribesman had fenced in no more than the spot out of which he had made a farm, injustice would not have been done to the tribe: but he says the tribesman went further and fenced in a great deal more—“vast areas,” which he could not use, and also “claimed” these as his own. How does Mr. Doctrinaire know that? I did not state anything of the sort. Nor does the historian state anything of the sort. I was tracing title to land to its origin, and I contended that the origin of title to land was labor. Consequently, my contention was that the tribesman fenced in that which his labor had redeemed from the wilderness—his original purpose in fencing it in being _partly_ to identify what was his own, _partly_ to assert his exclusive possession, _but chiefly_ to protect his crop from the ravages of the wild animals that were still roaming at large in the forest. Mr. Doctrinaire must remember that the fencing of the farm was one of the most tremendous difficulties that the pioneer met with. _He_ had no barbed wire; _he_ had no woven wire, _he_ had no convenient sawmill from which he could haul plank. No; _he_ had to cut down enormous trees, and by the hardest labor known to physical manhood, he had to split those trees into rails, and with these rails fence in that little dominion which he rescued from “the wild,” that little oasis in a great desert of savagery.