ed on a sort of rough adjustment among the invaders of the Roman
empire. They could be idealized as the result of a division by
agreement and of successions to, or acquisitions from, those who
participated therein. Another part represented new "natural" titles
based on discovery and occupation in the new world. Thus a Romanized,
idealized scheme of the titles by which European states of the
seventeenth century held their territories becomes a universal theory
of property.

Pufendorf rests his whole theory upon an original pact. He argues that
there was in the beginning a "negative community." That is, all things
were originally _res communes_. No one owned them. They were subject
to use by all. This is called a negative community to distinguish it
from affirmative ownership by co-owners. He declares that men
abolished the negative community by mutual agreement and thus
established private ownership. Either by the terms of this pact or by
a necessary implication what was not occupied then and there was
subject to acquisition by discovery and occupation, and derivative
acquisition of titles proceeding from the abolition of the negative
community was conceived to be a further necessary implication.

In Anglo-American law, the justification of property on a natural
principle of occupation of ownerless things got currency through
Blackstone. As between Locke on the one side and Grotius and Pufendorf
on the other, Blackstone was not willing to commit himself to the need
of assuming an original pact. Apparently he held that a principle of
acquisition by a temporary power of control co-extensive with
possession expressed the nature of man in primitive times and that
afterwards, with the growth of civilization, the nature of man in a
civilized society was expressed by a principle of complete permanent
control of what had been occupied exclusively, including as a
necessary incident of such control the _ius disponendi_. Maine has
pointed out that this distinction between an earlier and a later stage
in the natural right of property grew out of desire to bring the
theory into accord with Scriptural accounts of the Patriarchs and
their relations to the land grazed by their flocks. In either event
the ultimate basis is taken to be the nature of man as a rational
creature, expressed in a natural principle of control of things
through occupation or in an original contract providing for such
ownership.

With the revival of natural l