he
conditions required by Roman jurisprudence for the acquisition of
property in a valuable object which could be covered by the hand.

To all who pursue the inquiries which are the subject of this volume,
Occupancy is pre-eminently interesting on the score of the service it
has been made to perform for speculative jurisprudence, in furnishing
a supposed explanation of the origin of private property. It was once
universally believed that the proceeding implied in Occupancy was
identical with the process by which the earth and its fruits, which
were at first in common, became the allowed property of individuals.
The course of thought which led to this assumption is not difficult to
understand, if we seize the shade of difference which separates the
ancient from the modern conception of Natural Law. The Roman lawyers
had laid down that Occupancy was one of the Natural modes of acquiring
property, and they undoubtedly believed that, were mankind living
under the institutions of Nature, Occupancy would be one of their
practices. How far they persuaded themselves that such a condition of
the race had ever existed, is a point, as I have already stated, which
their language leaves in much uncertainty; but they certainly do seem
to have made the conjecture, which has at all times possessed much
plausibility, that the institution of property was not so old as the
existence of mankind. Modern jurisprudence, accepting all their dogmas
without reservation, went far beyond them in the eager curiosity with
which it dwelt on the supposed state of Nature. Since then it had
received the position that the earth and its fruits were once _res
nullius_, and since its peculiar view of Nature led it to assume
without hesitation that the human race had actually practised the
Occupancy of _res nullius_ long before the organisation of civil
societies, the inference immediately suggested itself that Occupancy
was the process by which the "no man's goods" of the primitive world
became the private property of individuals in the world of history. It
would be wearisome to enumerate the jurists who have subscribed to
this theory in one shape or another, and it is the less necessary to
attempt it because Blackstone, who is always a faithful index of the
average opinions of his day, has summed them up in his 2nd book and
1st chapter.

"The earth," he writes, "and all things therein were the general
property of mankind from the immediate gift of the Cr