that institution, that _everything ought to have an
owner_. When possession is taken of a "res nullius," that is, of an
object which _is_ not, or has _never_ been, reduced to dominion, the
possessor is permitted to become proprietor from a feeling that all
valuable things are naturally the subjects of an exclusive enjoyment,
and that in the given case there is no one to invest with the right of
property except the Occupant. The Occupant in short, becomes the
owner, because all things are presumed to be somebody's property and
because no one can be pointed out as having a better right than he to
the proprietorship of this particular thing.

Even were there no other objection to the descriptions of mankind in
their natural state which we have been discussing, there is one
particular in which they are fatally at variance with the authentic
evidence possessed by us. It will be observed that the acts and
motives which these theories suppose are the acts and motives of
Individuals. It is each Individual who for himself subscribes the
Social Compact. It is some shifting sandbank in which the grains are
Individual men, that according to the theory of Hobbes is hardened
into the social rock by the wholesome discipline of force. It is an
Individual who, in the picture drawn by Blackstone, "is in the
occupation of a determined spot of ground for rest, for shade, or the
like." The vice is one which necessarily afflicts all the theories
descended from the Natural Law of the Romans, which differed
principally from their Civil Law in the account which it took of
Individuals, and which has rendered precisely its greatest service to
civilisation in enfranchising the individual from the authority of
archaic society. But Ancient Law, it must again be repeated, knows
next to nothing of Individuals. It is concerned not with Individuals,
but with Families, not with single human beings, but groups. Even when
the law of the State has succeeded in permeating the small circles of
kindred into which it had originally no means of penetrating, the view
it takes of Individuals is curiously different from that taken by
jurisprudence in its maturest stage. The life of each citizen is not
regarded as limited by birth and death; it is but a continuation of
the existence of his forefathers, and it will be prolonged in the
existence of his descendants.

The Roman distinction between the Law of Persons and the Law of
Things, which though extremely conve