or passing
and continuing such law? The legal theory does not contain a final
explanation. Each of these theories has its defects, but each points
to some fact important and significant, at certain times and places,
in the explanation of this widespread institution.

Sec. 5. #Origin vs. justification#. The question of the origin is not the
same as that of the present justification of the existing system of
private property. The institution of private property has evolved
under diverse conditions. In early societies individual property
rights were not very clearly marked. Every tribe asserted against
other tribes, and tried to uphold by war, its claims upon its
customary hunting grounds; but the claims of the individual hunters
on land within the tribe did not often come into conflict. Private
property at the outset was in personal possessions, ornaments,
weapons, utensils, which were very meager in that primitive society
in which it was the custom "to go calling with a club instead of a
card-case." Only later came individual property in land. A few years
ago it was generally believed that the organization of the old German
tribes was politically an almost perfect democracy, and economically
a communism in which all had equal claims upon the land. To-day this
opinion is very seriously questioned. It seems probable that there was
a goodly measure of communism in the control and use of lands (tho not
in other things), but this was largely confined to an oligarchy of the
favored; whereas the masses lived in subjection, cut off from all but
a meager share in the common lands. However that may have been, strong
forces within historic times have put an end to the common ownership
and tillage of land as it existed among the peasants of Europe. That
system was shown by experience to be wasteful. Competition tended to
bring the economic agents into more efficient hands, and the movement
was furthered by many acts of injustice and violence on the part of
those in power.

Inquiries into the origin and development of any social institution
are interesting and helpful in forming an estimate of its present
significance, but the problems of the past are not those of to-day.
Whether or not the ancient beginning of property in Europe was in
violence and evil has but a remote bearing on the question as to the
present working of it. Social conditions and needs have not changed
more than have the forms and limits of property itself. Each