ancient laws and social arrangements totally different in
principle from those which regulate society and property in
the feudally constituted states. Their country is peculiarly
interesting to the political economist. It is the only part
of Europe in which property from the earliest ages has been
transmitted upon the principle of partition among all the
children. The feudal structure of society with its law of
primogeniture, and its privileged class of hereditary
nobles, never prevailed in Norway. In this remote corner of
the civilized world we may therefore see the effects upon
the condition of society of the peculiar distribution of
property; it will exhibit, on a small scale, what America
and France will be a thousand years hence.... Here are the
Highland glens without the Highland lairds.... If there be a
happy class of people in Europe it is the Norwegian _Bonde_,
king of his own land, and landlord as well as king.'

This state of happiness is, according to Mr. Laing, the result of the
still existing _Odels ret_ or Allodial Right, under which, he asserts,
the land of Norway was always the property of the people, not of a
feudal class of high nobility. But although this assertion does not much
affect the main and practical object of our enquiry, it may be as well
to point out at once that, whatever might have been the inherent right
of every Norwegian to a portion of the soil on which he was born, Dr.
Broch, an eminent native authority, maintains that a considerable
portion of the land belonged anciently to the kings of Norway, and had
been acquired, as in other countries, partly by confiscation from
nobles. Those lands were leased and, gradually, to a certain extent,
sold. In the days of Roman Catholicism, the Church also held great
landed estates, which the State appropriated at the Reformation. No
inconsiderable part of the State domains was then leased, and, in short,
before the middle of the seventeenth century, leases comprised a little
more than half of the landed property of the country; while even in
1814, they constituted one-third of it. Later, the State lands, and
those which had been distributed among nobles at the Reformation, were
repartitioned among the bulk of the population or sold.

But to return to the _Odels ret_. It gives, Mr. Laing shows,

'to all the kindred of the Odelsmand in possession, in the
order o