villagers of the Austrian and Turkish provinces
by the elders of their body, but then it is a distribution once for
all of the total produce of the year. In the Russian villages,
however, the substance of the property ceases to be looked upon as
indivisible, and separate proprietary claims are allowed freely to
grow up, but then the progress of separation is peremptorily arrested
after it has continued a certain time. In India, not only is there no
indivisibility of the common fund, but separate proprietorship in
parts of it may be indefinitely prolonged and may branch out into any
number of derivative ownerships, the _de facto_ partition of the stock
being, however, checked by inveterate usage, and by the rule against
the admission of strangers without the consent of the brotherhood. It
is not of course intended to insist that these different forms of the
Village Community represent distinct stages in a process of
transmutation which has been everywhere accomplished in the same
manner. But, though the evidence does not warrant our going so far as
this, it renders less presumptuous the conjecture that private
property, in the shape in which we know it, was chiefly formed by the
gradual disentanglement of the separate rights of individuals
from the blended rights of a community. Our studies in the Law of
Persons seemed to show us the Family expanding into the Agnatic group
of kinsmen, then the Agnatic group dissolving into separate
households; lastly the household supplanted by the individual; and it
is now suggested that each step in the change corresponds to an
analogous alteration in the nature of Ownership. If there be any truth
in the suggestion, it is to be observed that it materially affects the
problem which theorists on the origin of Property have generally
proposed to themselves. The question--perhaps an insoluble one--which
they have mostly agitated is, what were the motives which first
induced men to respect each other's possessions? It may still be put,
without much hope of finding an answer to it, in the form of any
inquiry into the reasons which led one composite group to keep aloof
from the domain of another. But, if it be true that far the most
important passage in the history of Private Property is its gradual
elimination from the co-ownership of kinsmen, then the great point of
inquiry is identical with that which lies on the threshold of all
historical law--what were the motives which originally prompt