The institutions that Sir H. Maine and M. de Laveleye call primitive, are so in the sense at least of being the earliest usages of society emerged from savagery, and in some degree settled. And M. de Laveleye's work affords a magnificent example of the immense range of investigation for which there was room in respect of one of the chief of those institutions. However widely some of his readers may dissent from his views with respect to the modern distribution of landed property, there will be but one opinion respecting the breadth of research and learning with which he has frustrated its primitive forms. To the evidence previously collected by Sir H. Maine and the Danish and German scholars already referred to, he has added proofs gathered from almost every part of the globe. Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Russia, the southern Slav countries, Java, China, part of Africa, central America, and Peru, are among the regions laid under contribution. Slavs, says M. de Laveleye, "boast of the communal institutions of the village community as peculiar to their race, and destined to secure its supremacy, by preserving it from the social struggles impending over the States of Western Europe; but when it is proved, that similar institutions are to be found in all ages, in all climates, and among the most distinct nations and races, we must see in their prevalence a necessary phase of social development and a universal law, as it were, presiding over the evolutions of the forms of landed property." It should not, however, be overlooked that the stage of development in which such institutions are natural, is a primitive one, and that their retention may be a mark not of superiority, but of backwardness, like the retention of those first implements to which M. de Laveleye alludes, and which in the age of stone were universal.
The term "natural" has been indeed a source of so much confusion and error in both the philosophy of law and political economy, that it might be well to expel it altogether from the terminology of both; but it could not be more legitimately applied than in the proposition that there is a natural movement, as society advances, from common to separate property in land as in chattels. This movement is perceptible among the Slav nations themselves, and it is closely connected with the movement from status to contract which Sir H. Maine has shewn to be one of the principal phases of civilization. Since the emancipation of the Russian peasantry, as M.
de Laveleye observes, "the old patriarchal family has tended to fall asunder.
The sentiment of individual independence is weakening and destroying it.
