them*; and from its being recorded, among
the most memorable achievements of very
eminent men, that they dug or discovered
a well. Land, which is now so important
a part of property, which alone our laws
call real property, and regard upon
all oc-
casions with such peculiar attention, was
probably not made property in any coun-
try, till long after the institution of many
other species of property, that is, till the
country became populous, and tillage be-
gan to be thought of. The first partition
of an estate which we read of, was that
which took place between Abram and Lot,
and was one of the simplest imaginable:
"If thou wilt take the left hand, then I
"will go to the right; or if thou depart to
"the right hand, then I will go to the left."
There are no traces of property in land in
Cæsar's account of Britain; little of it in
the history of the Jewish patriarchs; none
of it found amongst the nations of North
America; the Scythians are expressly said
to have appropriated their cattle and hous-
es, but to have left their land in common.

Property in immoveables continued at first. no longer than the occupation: that is, so * Genesis xxi. 25; xxvi. 18.

VOL. I.

I

long as a man's family continued in possession of a cave, or whilst his flocks depastured upon a neighbouring hill, no one attempted, or thought he had a right, to disturb or drive them out; but when the man quitted his cave, or changed his pasture, the first who found them unoccupied, entered upon them, by the same title as hist predecessor's; and made way in his turn for any one that happened to succeed him. All more permanent property in land was probably posterior to civil government and to laws; and therefore settled by these, or according to the will of the reigning chief.

CHAPTER IV.

IN WHAT THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY IS

FOUNDED.

We now speak of Property in Land: and there is a difficulty in explaining the origin of this property, consistently with the law of nature; for the land was once, no doubt, common, and the question is, how any particular part of it could justly be taken out of the common, and so appropriated to the first owner, as to give him a better right to

it than others; and, what is more, a right to exclude all others from it.

Moralists have given many different accounts of this matter; which diversity alone, perhaps, is a proof that none of them are satisfactory.

One tells us that mankind, when they suffered a particular person to occupy a piece of ground, by tacit consent relinquished their right to it; and as the piece of ground, they say, belonged to mankind collectively, and mankind thus gave up their right to the first peaceable occupier, it thenceforward became his property, and no one afterwards had a right to molest him in it.

The objection to this account is, that consent can never be presumed from silence, where the person whose consent is required knows nothing about the matter; which must have been the case with all mankind, except the neighbourhood of the place where the appropriation was made. And to suppose that the piece of ground previously belonged to the neighbourhood, and that they had a just power of conferring a right to it upon whom they pleased, is to suppose the question resolved, and a

partition of land to have already taken place.

Another says, that each man's limbs and labour are his own exclusively; that, by occupying a piece of ground, a man inseparably mixes his labour with it; by which means the piece of ground becomes thenceforward his own, as you cannot take it from him without depriving him at the same time of something which is indisputably his.

This is Mr. Locke's solution; and seems indeed a fair reason, where the value of the labour bears a considerable proportion to the value of the thing; or where the thing derives its chief use and value from the labour. Thus game and fish, though they be common whilst at large in the woods or water, instantly become the property of the person that catches them; because an animal, when caught, is much more valuable than when at liberty; and this increase of value, which is inseparable from, and makes a great part of, the whole value, is strictly the property of the fowler or fisherman, being the produce of his personal labour. For the same reason, wood. or iron, manufactured into utensils, be

comes the property of the manufacturer; because the value of the workmanship far exceeds that of the materials. And upon a similar principle, a parcel of unappropriated ground, which a man should pare, burn, plough, harrow, and sow, for the production of corn, would justly enough be thereby made his own. But this will hardly hold, in the manner it has been applied, of taking a ceremonious possession of a tract of land, as navigators do of new-discovered islands, by erecting a standard, engraving an inscription, or publishing a proclamation to the birds and beasts; or of turning your cattle into a piece of ground, setting up a landmark, digging a ditch, or planting a hedge round it. Nor will even the clearing, manuring, and ploughing of a field, give the first occupier a right to it in perpetuity, and after this cultivation and all effects of it are ceased.

Another, and in my opinion a better, account of the first right of ownership, is the following: that, as God has provided these things for the use of all, he has of consequence giyen each leave to take of them what he wants: by virtue therefore of this leave, a man may appropriate what he