ided between his widow and
his heirs. Now that may seem commonplace enough; but it is interesting
to note, as in the law, personal property did not come first; property
in land was many centuries earlier. And this suggests the legal basis
and present tendency of the law of property. "Property exists only
by the law"; and extreme socialists say that all private property is
robbery. No law, no property; this is true. Property is an artificial
thing. It is a creation of law. In other words, where there is now no
law except statute, it is the creation of statute. That may sound a
commonplace, but is not, when you remember that socialists, who are
attacking property, do so on precisely that ground. They say it is a
fictitious thing, it is a matter of expediency, it is a matter which
we can recognize or not, as we like; "no law, no property," and they
ask us to consider whether, on the whole, it is a good thing to have
any property at all, or whether the state had not better own all the
property. But our Federal and State constitutions guard it expressly.

Thus, property is the very earliest legal concept expressed in
statutes, just as it is perhaps the earliest notion that gets into a
child's mind. And ownership of land preceded _personal_ property--for
the perfectly simple reason that there was very little personal
property until comparatively late in civilization, and for the other
more significant reason that an Anglo-Saxon freeman didn't bother with
law when he had his good right hand. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh
centuries, when we were barbarous tribes, a man's personal property
consisted chiefly in his spear, his weapons, or his clothes; enemies
were not very apt to take them, and if they did, he was prepared to
defend them. Then, cattle, in those days, belonged to the tribe and
not to the individual. So, I should fancy, of ships--that is, galleys,
not private "coracles," the earliest British boats. Consequently there
wasn't any need for a law as to personal property. What little there
was could be easily defended. But with land it was different. Property
in land was recognized both among the English and, of course, with the
Normans; and in ways so similar that it was very easy for the Normans
to impose the feudal system upon England. There had been no feudal
system before the Norman Conquest; there were then three kinds of
land: the rare and exceptional _individual_ land, owned by one
man--always a freeman, not a