enius of Napoleon.

Under the _ancien regime_ the rights of the feudal lords of the land
over the mines beneath the soil had been contested by the steadily
increasing power of the sovereign. In the case of the Anzin Company, and
of the articles of association adopted in 1757, we see the practical
good sense of the practical men who adopted those articles bringing
about a good working arrangement between the concessions granted by the
Crown and the claims advanced by the lords of the land. The republican
legislators in 1791 concocted a mining law, under which the dominion of
the sovereign, taken over by the State, was brought into perpetual
conflict with the recognised, but undefined, rights of the lords of the
soil. Such was the mischief caused by this ill-digested law that, in
1810, Napoleon made an end of it, and substituted for it an imperial
law, under which the absolute ownership of mines in France might be
conferred by a concession of the Government. 'The act of concession,'
says the seventh article of the law, 'gives a perpetual ownership of the
mine, which from that moment may be disposed of and transmitted like any
other kind of property, and no holder of it can be expropriated, except
in the cases and under the forms prescribed with, regard to all other
properties.' This law of course made an end both of the royalties of
the old French system, and of the English and American doctrine that he
who owns the land owns up to the sky and down to the centre of the
earth. For while the State recognises under this law the owner of the
surface, and provides that the State shall give him what may be called a
kind of 'compensation for disturbance' though on a scale to be fixed by
itself, it recognises in him no ownership whatever of the mine beneath
his soil.

Nor does it recognise under this law any right in the discoverer of a
mine to a proprietary interest in a property which but for him might
never have existed as an available property at all, either for the owner
of the surface, or for the State, or for the concessionary of the State.
The founders of the Anzin Company in 1757, it will be seen, recognised
the right of Pierre Mathieu, the discoverer of bituminous coal at Anzin,
to such a proprietary interest in the mine he had discovered; but they
recognised it with a practical and sensible reference to the concurrent
rights also of other people, and to the general utility. So much more
deftly, it would appear, were p