ssession of
the individual has not been clearly stated. The earlier settlers were
either individuals, families, tribes, or nations. In some cases they
were nomadic, and used the natural products without taking possession
of the land; in others they occupied districts differently defined. The
individual was the unit of the family, the patriarch of the tribe. The
commune was formed to afford mutual protection. Each sept or tribe in
the early enjoyment of the products of the district it selected was
governed by its own customary laws. The cohesion of these tribes
into states was a slow process; the adoption of a general system of
government still slower. The disintegration of the tribal system, and
dissolution of the commune, was not evolved out of the original elements
of the system itself, but was the effect of conquest; and, as far as I
can discover, the appropriation to individuals of land which was common
to all, was mainly brought about by conquest, and was guided by impulse
rather than regulated by principle.

Mr. Locke thinks that an individual became sole owner of a part of the
common heritage by mixing his labor with the land, in fencing it, making
wells, or building; and he illustrates his position by the appropriation
of wild animals, which are common to all sportsmen, but become the
property of him who captures or kills them. This acute thinker seems
to me to have fallen into a mistake by confounding land with labor. The
improvements were the property of the man who made them, but it by no
means follows that the expenditure of labor on land gave any greater
right than to the labor itself or its representative.

It may not be out of place here to allude to the use of the word
property with reference to land; property--from proprium, my own--is
something pertaining to man. I have a property in myself. I have
the right to be free. All that proceeds from myself, my thoughts, my
writings, my works, are property; but no man made land, and therefore
it is not property. This incorrect application of the word is the more
striking in England, where the largest title a man can have is "tenancy
in fee," and a tenant holds but does not own.

Sir William Blackstone places the possession of land upon a different
principle. He says that, as society became formed, its instinct was to
preserve the peace; and as a man who had taken possession of land could
not be disturbed without using force, each man continued to enjoy the