Chapter XVI: The Swiss Allmends (1)

All the realm shall be in common, * * *
And there shall be no money.--SHAKESPEARE.

The reader will have seen that I was, throughout the excursion recorded in the foregoing pages, paying some attention to the Swiss Allmends. Allmend means land which is held and used, as the word itself indicates, in common. In this general sense it includes common land of all kinds, whether in pasture, under forest, or in cultivation. In ordinary usage, however, it has come, without absolutely excluding the two former kinds, to signify common land under cultivation, with, in fact, almost a further restriction to common land, in which the cultivation is effected by the spade, or at all events, by the hand of man.

It is to the old burgers in any commune that these kinds of land are common. The old burgers are, with but very few exceptions, the lineal descendants of those who were burgers, say 200, it may have been 500, or even 1,000 years ago. New burgers are those, or the descendants of those, who, having come in from other cantons, or communes, settled in the place, and who have no rights of any kind in the common land. Land may be common to all the old burgers of a commune equally: it is then said to belong to the commune. Or it may belong to sections of the old burgers, as, for instance, to those who reside in a particular hamlet; or to those who belong to a particular class of families; and these may hold it either simply for their own use, or for the promotion of some defined object: in any such cases it is said to belong to a corporation.

A Swiss commune may be taken as the analogue of an English parish. The difference is that all the burgers, old and new, of a commune have now, generally--the old burgers, according to the old theory of the commune, had always had--an equal voice in the government and administration of the affairs of the commune, with the exception of the management and usufruct of the common property, which belongs, as it always has done, exclusively to the old burgers, either collectively, or sectionally. Residents from other cantons, or communes, are now pretty generally admitted more or less completely to participation in political rights. Formerly this was not the case: they were only tolerated. But with respect to the common property, whether of the commune or of its corporations, they are still rigidly excluded from all participation in it. For instance, there are alien families, that is to say, not descended from old burgers, which have been settled in Schwyz for two centuries, but which at this day have no share in the common lands. In order to bring an English rural parish into the same political condition as a Swiss commune, the humblest day-labourer ought to have, theoretically and practically, an equal voice with the squire in the election of the magistrates and officials of all kinds, and in the management of the Church funds, the schools, the roads, the water supply, the poor, &c., of the parish. To take an extreme supposition, the parochial assembly ought to be competent to enact that the parish should hire or buy so much land as would enable it to allow to each family a quarter, or half, of an acre of garden-ground, rent free. If, for the purpose of enabling us to understand the difference, we take the Swiss commune to represent, in the political order, the natural state of things, we must then regard the English rural parish as having lost a part of its rights through the usurpations of the central government, which now appoints the magistrates &c.; and as having had the majority of its inhabitants disfranchised by the usurpations of the rate-payers. Or if we regard the English rural parish as the perfection of local organization, we must say that the Swiss commune has usurped on the one side the legitimate powers of the central government, and on the other deprived the natural parochial depositaries of power, that is to say, the rate-payers, of their rightful privilege of being the exclusive administrators of everything in which the parish is concerned. The governing element in the idea of our parish appears to be the land, in that of the Swiss commune, the individual man.

The commune, then, is not far from being an independent, autonomous entity, both politically and economically. What we have now to consider is one department of its economy; that of its common lands. These, as I have already mentioned, consist of three distinct kinds; summer pastures, forests, and cultivable land. It follows from the fact of its autonomy that each commune will manage its common property very much in its own fashion; and probably there are no two communes which manage it in precisely the same fashion. But it also follows from the general similarity of their circumstances and conditions, that certain general features will pervade their management everywhere. It is with these general features that, in a notice of this kind, we are chiefly concerned. The little I shall have to say, in order to make them understood, will be founded on what I observed in the cantons I visited this summer, and in which I inquired into the system, and saw it at work. Those cantons were Unterwalden, Uri, Schwyz, and Glarus. My observations will, to some extent, be illustrated and checked by facts drawn from other quarters. For there is nothing in the world, whether in human institutions, in physiology, or in anything else, that can be understood if looked at as an isolated phenomenon. There is no such thing as an isolated phenomenon. Not even is the world itself such, any more than anything it contains. Everything is relative, concatenated, dependent; has causes, a _milieu_, functions, &c.; all of which so modify it, have so much to do with its being as and what it is, and throw so much light upon it, that if it is to be understood, some reference must be made to them.

* * * * *

We will begin with the common pastures for summering cattle--the alpes. Upon this subject the Statistical Bureau of the Federal Government published, in 1868, a quarto volume of 435 pages, to which I have already referred. It is a work of very comprehensive details, and of much interest. It exhibits completely, and analyzes thoroughly, all the information the office had, up to that date, been able to collect on the subject. I will now extract from this report such leading particulars as will give the reader a general knowledge of this part of the matter, premising the observation, which the Bureau makes, that whatever errors there may be in the figures must always, for obvious reasons, be on the side of their falling short of the truth.

The number of alpes is 4,559. Their aggregate area, in English acres, is somewhere about 2,650,000; which about equals the area of the four counties of Middlesex, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent. Their capital value, by the returns made, is 77,186,103 francs. But, as the office remarks, that probably at least a half must be added to this sum to get at the true figures, we may suppose that their aggregate capital value is, in English money, about 4,500,000_l_. Their letting value is returned at 3,362,642 francs. The number of cow-runs is returned as 270,389. The average number of days the alpes are fed at 93. The gross revenue at 10,893,874 francs. The net revenue at 9,545,007 francs. A fairly good cow in Switzerland, I was told, is worth twenty napoleons. We will take the good and the indifferent as averaging fifteen napoleons. This will make the value of the stock yearly put on the alpes, in English money, 3,250,000_l._ If then we put the capital value at 4,500,000_l._, and to this add the value of the stock, and for the sake of round sums, raise the net proceeds, which we may do safely, to 12,500,000 francs, we shall have 500,000_l._ as the net revenue on a capital of 7,750,000_l._ This will give a little less than 7 per cent. profits for this portion of the property of the Swiss people, for 93 days. The Bureau calculates a much higher rate of profit. I say for 93 days, because though this is all they get during the year from the alpes, the cows are earning profits for them elsewhere during the rest of the year.

To this 500,000_l._ of profits we must add, looking at the concern from a national point of view, the support of all those who, as cowherds and cheese-makers, or as engaged in the sale at home of the cheese, or in its transportation to foreign markets, are wholly, or in part, maintained by it. No deductions need be made from this net sum, for the cows replace themselves; and whatever is expended on the pastures has been already deducted.

We now come to the distribution of this property, and of its income. Taking

Francs

The capital value at the low and uncorrected figures of 77,186,103
The letting 3,362,642
The total gross revenue 10,893,874

and distributing these several sums according to ownership, we find the respective interests of the several owners to be as follows:--

Communes Communes Corporations Private
and private owners
owners
jointly

Capital value. 26,226,265 3,851,489 14,565,487 32,542,853 }
Letting value. 1,127,355 199,270 443,803 1,592,214 } Francs.
Gross revenue 4,010,102 624,102 1,788,224 4,471,446 }

From this it would appear that the average selling value of a cow-run for an average of 93 days is 287 francs. Its average letting value 12 francs 48 cents. Its gross average revenue 40 francs 45 cents. This is according to the returns, which very much underrate the true figures. Their respective values in the neighbourhood of populous towns rise to several times the amounts of these averages.

The figures given will enable the reader to understand the magnitude of this part of our subject. The population of Switzerland, now somewhat over 2,500,000, has, in proportion to its numbers, a larger share in the manufacture of cotton and silk than any other in the world. Of course this, and the rapid increase in the number of travellers who every year visit the country, must have of late very much augmented the population. If, however, we divide this augmented population into families of 6 souls each, we shall find that the revenue accruing from communal and corporation alpes, excluding those held by private owners, is still sufficient to give yearly, for these 93 days, 10_s._ to every family in the country. The sum required to do the same for every family in the United Kingdom would be 2,666,666_l._ a year. But as we know that in Switzerland the majority of families, from living in towns and from other causes, have no share in the revenue accruing from the use of the common alpes, we must set down the average share of each actual participant as very much more than double this sum. In fact, two would be a low average for the number belonging to those who send up cows to these alpes: but if we take two as the average, this would give about 3_l._ a year as the average net profit of each _usager_.

The next point for consideration is, how has it come about that these common pastures form so large a feature in Swiss agronomy? The probability is that the system was once universal in Switzerland; and not among the Swiss only, but also among all other people when they were in the stage which is intermediate between the pastoral and the agricultural condition. The agricultural condition implies a precedent pastoral condition. Now as long as people are in the pastoral stage, or in the intermediate stage, when the agricultural and the pastoral are in conflict, common pasturage is inevitable. The system now in vogue in our Australian colonies is not a case to the contrary, because that belongs to the era of capital, and takes its form from the action of capital. There is abundant evidence of this conflict, with its necessary condition, common pasturage, having once been the rule in Germany, in France, in this country, and elsewhere. Circumstances, which are absolutely sovereign in a matter of this kind, for there is no possibility of resisting them, carried other countries out of this state of things, while they kept Switzerland in it. If a thousand, or five hundred years ago, some Titans of the race that undertook to set Ossa upon Pelion, and to roll to the top of the pile Olympus with all his forests, had run a mountain-crusher over Switzerland and flattened in its Alps, then the system of common pasturage could no more have existed there down to our time than in the plains of Lombardy or the vale of Aylesbury.

* * * * *

But this is a point there is no understanding without a general acquaintance with the whole subject, which belongs to, and is indeed the main stem in, the growth and evolution of human society. The history of human society is the record of its growth; no particular stage of which can be understood, if disconnected from what preceded it; that is to say, without a knowledge of the precedent history, which was that out of which the subsequent history grew. We ourselves cannot be regarded as having reached the final stage in that evolution. The time of course will come, when it will be seen that the point at which we now are, as respects not the land only but many other things also, was not a permanent resting place, but merely a step in an endlessly ascending series. The evolution, in other words the orderly advance, in harmony with advancing circumstances, of the uses of the land, which has been going on from the beginning, will continue--at all events we have no reason for supposing the contrary--as long as man and the land shall continue. If the past in this matter had been compounded of haphazard progression and retrogression on the same level, or of mingled ascents and descents on haphazard uneven ground, there would probably be no evidence perceptible of plan or design; and then we should not be able to understand how any particular stage--indeed, there would then be no stages--had been reached. Nor, with respect to our own existing position, should we be able to conjecture in what direction things might be tending. Observation and thought would be futile, and action aimless, were everything, in such a fashion, the sport of blind accident. But now, because we see that these matters are subject to a law of growth, we can trace their history, and reason about them, and understand them; and notwithstanding the action of temporarily disturbing causes, even when accompanied with checks and hardships, can rest in the belief that Omnipotent and Beneficent Intelligence directs them, no less than all the other phenomena of the universe.

What, then, we have to determine is, What, as constituted by nature, is the relation of man to the land? What have been the advances in circumstances that bear upon this relation? And how have they affected it, or how has it dealt with them? That is to say, What are the facts, or the principles, that underlie the history? And what has been their history? It is evident that some general knowledge of this kind must be requisite for the right appreciation of any particular stage. For instance, without it we shall not be able to understand what this Swiss system, about which we are now inquiring, really was? what made it what it was? what is the place it occupies in the great historical series of advances through which man’s relation to the land has passed? and what it is that is now rendering it unsuitable to existing circumstances, and so preparing the way for something higher and better?

We must begin at the beginning. What, in the earliest times of all, was the relation of man to the land? What had nature ordained it to be? What was its original purport, form, and character? They will, we can believe, be seen most distinctly under the simplest and least complicated conditions. The first stage must have been that in which man lived by the chase--by the pursuit and capture of wild animals; and in a less degree by the fruits of the earth produced spontaneously in their season. This must have come first, because if man were placed abruptly in a world, already peopled with wild animals, and with plants that at times bore fruit, these could have been the only means available for supporting life. To this day it continues to be so among many savage tribes; a fact which throws much light upon man’s history. We also know that it was so once in parts of the world where it has long ceased to be so. For instance, geological investigations have shown that there was a time when it was so in this island. The relation therefore of the land to primitive man was that it supplied him with the food that was to support his life. That was the substance, the principle, of the relation. Man and the land were two related terms; and the food, which the land produced and the man consumed, was the third term, which brought them into relation. It constituted the relation.

And in the character and purport of this relation there was no difference at all between sovereign man and the lower animals. The relation was precisely the same for everything that breathed. In the first stage, indeed, man’s condition was very little in advance of that of the lower animals. His life was passed, and supported very much in the same fashion as theirs.

A coefficient condition of this primæval relation was that of property. Each tribe had its own hunting ground, which was its own property. It was its own property because other tribes were not allowed to hunt over it, to use it, or to encroach upon it in any way. It was jealously guarded for the separate use of the tribe. This was necessary: and therefore, like the relation itself, an ordinance of nature. And it, too, is a condition which exists among and is enforced by, and we cannot but suppose must always have existed among and been enforced by, the lower animals. Each pair of lions, and each pair of redbreasts, has its own hunting ground, from which other lions, or other redbreasts, that attempt to encroach upon it, are violently expelled. But property, among these hunting tribes, must always have been, as we see that it is at this day, of two kinds. There was that which belonged to the whole tribe equally. This applied to the land they hunted over. It was held in common, because, under the circumstances, it was necessary that it should be so held. This was the only way in which the fundamental principle of the relation of the land to man--that its use is to supply man with food--could have been carried out then. Its common use arose out of, and was necessitated by existing circumstances. It could not have been divided into portions for each family, because the wild game, the human food it then produced, was not at all times evenly distributed throughout it, but would sometimes be on one part of the run and sometimes on another. Still the recognition of this necessity, as respected the land, did not exclude either the idea, or the fact, of separate individual property. That form also of property was, in this the lowest stage of human society, understood and acted upon. If a man had fortified a cave against the entrance of wild beasts, or had built a hut, or wigwam, that did not belong to the tribe, but to himself, as much so as the burrow, or lair, or nest, an animal forms for itself, is its own. So with the skins he might have dressed; the stones and bones he might have chipped and pointed; the bows and arrows, the spears and clubs, the slings and throwing sticks he had made; and after a time, too, with the women he had acquired by capture or purchase; and the children they had borne to him.

The necessity of association must also, from the beginning, have been a corollary to the right of property. There never could have been a time when it could have been dispensed with. If each family had dwelt in isolation, it could not have protected itself, or its hunting ground, either against wild beasts, or against encroaching neighbours. Nor could it have hunted so effectually as to have secured a supply of food. Association, therefore, was a necessity. And this, again, we find is resorted to by those animals which are not strong enough to protect themselves, or to capture their food, individually; or which require for their security more vigilance than could be maintained at all times by an isolated individual. It is not acted on by lions or tigers, because they can do without it, but it is acted on by the herbivorous animals, and even by some of the less swift, or less strong species of carnivors. The herbivors associate because though, notwithstanding their association, many will be destroyed by their natural enemies, still in consequence of their association into large communities, many will escape. And some of the carnivors, which pursue animals stronger or fleeter than themselves, as for instance wild dogs and wolves, associate, because by this means they can best secure their prey. Lions and tigers would associate if their herbivorous prey were to become far stronger than themselves.

Here, then, we have three main facts, a determinate relation, ordained by nature, of the land to man, a coefficient condition of that relation, and a corollary to that condition, which have existed from the beginning; and which, as far as we can see, must exist to the end. Neither society nor life could be maintained without them. Each of the three, in a sense and degree, the brute also recognizes.[4] The advancing circumstances of human society have in no way abrogated, or weakened them. The only difference is that the constitutive facts themselves, remaining throughout the same, have been suitably applied to the successive advances, whatever their character may have been, that have been made in the circumstances.

To these circumstances, which play so great a part in the history, for they it is that make the matter progressive, and so give it a history, we must now direct our attention. After a time some kinds of animals are domesticated, and society enters on the second, the pastoral stage. This was the first clearly defined advance in the circumstances. We know not where, or when, or how, or by whom were first domesticated the ox, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the horse, the ass, or the camel. The dates of these achievements, pregnant with so vast a series of mighty consequences, lie far back beyond the reach of the dimmest traditions of mankind. Here, however, we are concerned only with the way in which their domestication affected the tenure and the use of the land. The most obvious effects were that the extent of land, which had formerly been required for the maintenance of the tribe by the chase, would now maintain a great many more families; and that, in this part of the world, where moisture is continuous, and therefore grass abundant, (it would be different in the dry plains of Asia,) their lives could not possibly be so vagrant as had been the case with their hunting forefathers. Because now, instead of following the migrations of wild animals, and searching for them when sparingly dispersed over large areas, they would have to attend to their flocks and herds. But their flocks and herds would still have to be protected from wild beasts, and from their neighbours. A sufficient number therefore of families must be associated into a village community to enable it to guard its own pasture ground; which in no part of Europe needed to have been of any great extent. Our three great facts, that the object of the land is to produce food; that for this purpose it must be held as property; and that, in order that it may be so held, those to whom it belongs must associate themselves, have in no way been enfeebled. They still remain in force, and govern human life. And we shall see that they will continue to do this under every new combination of circumstances that will arise. We shall never come to a time when men will not remove whatever would, under the circumstances of the day, hinder the land from producing the greatest amount of food; nor when property will cease to exist, or cease to be modified according to circumstances; nor when men will cease to associate for its protection. With respect to the latter, history will show us the village growing into the city, and neighbouring cities associating, and growing, in one way or another, into unions of cities, nations, and empires; but the necessity for, and the object of association will remain the same; for persons and property will always need protection; collectively, against aggressions from without, and, in the case of the individual, against aggressions from within. The need of protection will remain, and will be provided for in just the same way when property shall have become so varied in kind, and the new kinds so vast in amount, that the aboriginal property of land, that once was all in all, shall have become of secondary importance. Neither will the need disappear, or the old means of providing for it become obsolete, when the number of the millions of those who are associated shall exceed the number of families that were associated in the old pastoral or hunting community. The purpose and principle were precisely the same in the village of a score of families, or in the combination of such villages in the primæval German forest, as it is at this day among the forty millions who are now associating themselves into the German Empire.

With respect to the form of private, individual property, that in the pastoral period assumed a great extension: for the flocks and herds--which had now become all in all to the community--were private property; whereas the wild animals, which in the foregoing stage had occupied that position, had been common property. The pasturage, however, still remained common to the flocks and herds of the inhabitants of the village; just as formerly the hunting area had been open to all the members of the old tribe. But the commencement of individual appropriations of land is now becoming visible; for any enclosures, near to the homestead, for the purpose of penning the cattle at night, and for protecting them against wild beasts and bad weather, will belong to those who have themselves constructed them for their own cattle.

In the hunting stage the tribe had ever been on the move, and their whole time had been expended in a hard, and often ineffectual struggle for bare existence. Nothing more was possible. But the inhabitants of the pastoral village have now become stationary; and have, on easy terms, a sufficiency of food. This places some leisure time, during the year, at their disposal. A great advance has been made; and it proves to be one which like all others has in itself the germ of future advances; for it leads on to the culture of the soil, which is the third stage. But this, too, was brought about at so remote a period in the lost history of the race, that there are no traces of traditions of when, or where, or how, or by whom was introduced the culture of any one of the different kinds of cereals. All of the matter that we know for certain is that the fact turns out to be exactly the contrary of what we might have expected. Such improvements, amounting to transformations, of the seeds of some now untraceable natural grasses into our different kinds of grain, we should have felt almost sure were quite beyond the capacities and opportunities of little village aggregations of savages, or at best of semi-savages. First the idea of the possibility of such transformations, and then the thought, care, and patience necessary for effecting them, we should have been disposed to ascribe only to people among whom knowledge had largely accumulated.

Suppositions, however, of this kind, though they would, before the matter had been investigated, have been entertained by almost everybody, are completely contradicted by the facts of the case. These assure us that we are indebted, beyond controversy, not only for the domestication of animals, but also for the existence of our cereals in their present form, to the ideas, and to the patient and thoughtful labour of our remote unnamed barbarian ancestors. And these barbarian inventors of wheat, barley, and oats, and, that we may not ungratefully exclude from their due the natives of the New World, we must add of maize also, were as great benefactors of the race as the inventors of letters, and of the steam-engine. And this ought to awaken within us both a stronger sense than we now have of the continuity and unity of human history, and a greater respect than we have for still existing barbarian races.

A highly interesting illustration and confirmation of the fact now before us has lately been brought to light. In ’69 the government of Mauritius sent a commissioner to collect specimens of the different kinds of sugar-cane cultivated by the natives of New Caledonia, and to report on their respective merits. His report was issued only a few months ago. It figures, and describes separately, forty-four kinds he found still in cultivation. In the copy I now have before me each of the forty-four figures is carefully coloured; variation in colour being in this plant an indication of other variations, some of which might be useful. Here, then, are savages of a very low type, for they even practise cannibalism when other means of supporting life have failed, cultivating forty-four varieties of a plant, which probably was not originally indigenous to their island; and of which it is very doubtful whether in their island it ever produced a fertile seed. Every variety therefore which originated among them must have been the result of a sport. And this must have been watched for, and turned to account when it presented itself. Indeed, their method of cultivating the sugar-cane, which is as wonderful as the number of kinds they cultivate, appears to be intelligently directed to the aim of producing sports. But it will be better to allow the commissioner himself to describe to us in his own words what he saw.

He says, ‘Besides the sugar-cane the chief alimentary support of the New Caledonians were,’ before the French took possession of the island, ‘the taro and yam. The former, requiring an abundant supply of water, was usually grown in terraces formed on the slopes of the natural amphitheatres presented by the spurs of the main mountain range, and most ingeniously irrigated by a constant _fillet_ of water. The latter, requiring a deep, open, rich, and well-drained soil, was planted on beds formed by heaping up the naturally thin surface soil of a few inches deep into beds of about three feet high by four feet wide, from which only one crop was taken, and the next year fresh ground was broken up for new plantations.

‘It was on the edges of these beds, forming, as will be at once evident, a peculiarly rich and deep loose soil, that the natives planted their canes, not in lines near each other, as we do, but twenty or thirty feet apart, and in a single row only. As the detached stools grew they were tied up in a bundle with straw, in order to exclude light and limit the number of shoots, and to force them to lengthen; and likewise to make them tender and juicy, instead of sweet. For a New Caledonian values a cane for the quantity of its juice, not for its saccharine qualities, and has probably never eaten a really ripe cane. No marvel that under such treatment, allowing only three or four canes to a stool, they should grow large and long; so long, in fact, that those which were tabooed, or kept for grand ceremonies, have, after two and a half or three years, attained a length of from twenty-five to thirty feet, and a diameter of four inches or more, requiring to be supported on forked sticks as they fell over. Above all it should be noted, that in direct opposition to our system, the cane was never replanted in the same land, thus giving it the best chance of progressive development, and avoiding the chances of degeneracy or disease. Every intelligent cultivator will at once recognize the necessarily practical effect of such a continual principle of selection carried out for perhaps centuries.’

Note the carefulness of these New Caledonians in this matter. The soil is collected and piled up into beds to secure a sufficiency of depth for the descending roots, in order that every root that could be formed might be turned to account. The canes are set in single rows to give to each leaf of each plant all the air and the light possible. The stems are banded up with straw to prevent evaporation. The plants in the single rows are set twenty or thirty feet apart, that there may be no interference of the roots of one plant with the roots of another. That they may have all the stimulation possible, they are never grown in succession on the same spot. Our science can suggest nothing more adapted, were it a seeding plant, to give rise to improved varieties by seed-variation, or to force a plant that does not produce seed into producing varieties by sporting. All this, too, is done under great local disadvantages and discouragements, for the island is most years affected with severe droughts and devastated with swarms of locusts which destroy the leaves of the canes. It is worth noting that the commissioner expresses the surprise he felt at witnessing the wonderful acuteness with which the natives distinguish unerringly, and give the native name to any cane shown to them which may have only an inch or two fully formed; frequently recognizing a still smaller specimen merely by its leaves. He never saw them make a mistake.

In this careful cultivation of the sugar-cane, and preservation of its varieties, we can hardly doubt but that we have an existing instance, _mutatis mutandis_, of the process by which some branch of our remote barbarian ancestors improved some grasses producing small edible seeds, into the kinds of grain we now cultivate. Similar care they had already bestowed on the formation of the races of domestic animals we now possess. And we ought not to forget that they were at the same time rough-hewing our language and morality. With respect to their morality--the parent stock of ours, as was the case with their language--we may, in passing, observe that in all probability they enforced and practised it, as Mr. Wallace, who lived for some years among the savages of these islands, found them practising theirs, much more rigidly than we do ours.

We have now reached a point at which we find that some reconstruction of the agrarian arrangements of the pastoral village community is being forced upon them. Formerly their flocks and herds were their only support. They are so no longer. The cultivated produce of the soil has not taken their place, but has become, to an indispensable degree, a subsidiary means of support. And as time goes on it is becoming so more and more largely, through increasing skill in the cultivation of the soil, and through its consequence, an increase of population. This new means of support has now become necessary; and it cannot be turned to account on land absolutely common. Each crop must be the property of the man who prepared the land for it, sowed, protected, and harvested it. The land therefore upon which it was grown must be his, for at all events the space of time requisite for these operations. This gives rise to the system of property in land limited in respect of time, that is to say, some form of the system of shifting severalties. Of course this must gradually pass into absolute permanent property, because the day will come when that will be necessary for enabling the community to obtain from the land the greatest amount of food. The conditions, however, that will suggest that are still a long way off. As changes become necessary, they will, each in its turn, have to fight for its establishment. The old methods will always have prescription, fact, tradition, custom to support them; the new, utility and necessity.

It is interesting to recall how recently amongst ourselves a stage of this conflict had to be fought out. From the Saxon times there had been established in this country a form of the agrarian system of village communities, the members of which had defined common rights in the land. It had in the early part of the Middle Ages become general. It was not a survival of, or a reversion to the ideas of the pastoral age. The two main features of that system had been that all the land of the village had been in precisely the same common condition, and that the rights in it also of every member of the village community had been precisely the same. Of this our mediæval agronomic system can be regarded as only a very remote descendant. In the first place it was devised for an agricultural community; and in the next it had to be adapted to a complicated social system of lords of manors, large and small freeholders, peasant cultivators, cotters, &c.; and each of these classes was in a different position from the others for turning to account its commonable rights. It was an attempt, under the social and economic conditions of the times, to make the land support the community. It supplemented the use of land that was more or less appropriated by large and various common rights. In the case of the peasant cultivators this was intended as compensation, just as it was in Russia, for the services exacted from them. The lands of the feudal lord, as of his Saxon predecessor, both of whom were necessary personages in the political system of their times, could not have been cultivated otherwise; for a general arrangement of rents and wages to be paid in money was impossible then. That old system has left in our language some traces of its existence. The words Lammas lands, lot-meadows, shifting severalties, folkland, open time, field-constraint, &c., once stood for some of its details. It was already dying out towards the close of the middle ages. The influx of silver on the discovery of America, by raising the price of wool in foreign markets for manufacturing purposes, at a time when there was no cause in operation to raise the price of wheat, hastened its decay. For it made it profitable to those who were in a position to effect it, to consolidate small holdings, which involved the extinction of the commonable rights that had appertained to their old cultivators. The Enclosure Commissioners of our own day had to deal with the last traces of the system.

For many centuries it did good service. It was workable, when perhaps nothing else could have been with the single exception of the old world form of slavery. But it could not stand after rent and wages had become possible, and when it was seen that by cultivating larger farms, and by the extinction of common rights, the land might be turned to better account for the community generally. New circumstances, possibilities, and requirements necessitated a new system. The object of the land is to provide food for those to whom it belongs, that is to say, for the community to which it belongs. This object has always overridden, and must always override every other consideration. For instance, the practice of Lammas lands (which meant that the members of the agrarian village community must each year cultivate on contiguous pieces of land the same grain crop, in order that the stubbles and succeeding fallow, on the whole space so cultivated, might, after the crops had been carried, be thrown open as common pasture to the cattle of the whole village,) could not possibly have been maintained after the introduction of artificial grasses and turnips; because every one could see that the land might be made to produce a great deal more food by ceasing to be Lammas land, and by being laid down with artificial grasses and cultivated for roots. And this could be done only by enclosing the land, which could not have been enclosed under the old system, and by extinguishing the old common rights. A man would not lay down artificial grasses, and cultivate roots, for the flocks and herds of the parish. If this method of increasing the food supply of an increasing population was to be resorted to, the artificial grasses and roots must be the property of the man who grew them. The land must be enclosed, and his neighbours’ flocks must be excluded at all seasons.

Henceforth the number of those who can keep flocks and herds will be much reduced. These will, however, in the aggregate be much larger than in former times. And through the medium of the other forms of industry to which the other members of the community will now be able, and required, to devote themselves, these larger flocks and herds will be in a sense common to all: they certainly will be produced for all. At first, and for a long time, hardships will ensue. But these, and even their long continuance, are no proof that the change does not belong to the natural order of things. Most changes are accompanied by throes and inconveniences; the use of which is to prevent the introduction of any changes excepting those which circumstances and events have demonstrated to be necessary and inevitable; and to force men to struggle to accommodate themselves to such as are of this kind. Take as an instance the change we are now speaking of. It was accompanied for some generations with great hardships. But most people will now readily acknowledge that it was both necessary and beneficial; and that it would be extremely mischievous to attempt to revert to it in any way or degree.

And just as it was with this mediæval system of ours, and with the semi-pastoral, the pastoral, and the hunting stages that went before it, so we may suppose will it be with our present land system, which appears to most of us as an ordinance of nature, that has been from everlasting, and must continue to be to everlasting. It would be to everlasting if the circumstances which gave rise to it were to be everlasting: and the same might have been said of every system that preceded it. But if it should become distinct to men’s minds that by the introduction of some change in the system the land of the country could be made, through means that have now become possible, to produce for the people of the country a great deal more food than it does under the present system, then the present system would go as certainly as the Lammas lands, lot-meadows, folklands, &c. of the old system went. To maintain a system which is giving less food, to the exclusion of one which would give more food, would appear as a contravention of the purpose of nature. Its foundations, that upon which it was built, and which upheld it, would be gone. It would have nothing but unsupported prescription to support it. And there would be at the same time events, facts, necessity pushing against it to overturn it, just in the same way as it itself pushed against and overturned what had been before itself. It would be thawed, like snow upon which the sun was shining. The perception by the community of the possibility of turning the land of the country to better account would be the sun that would melt it away; just as it had every system in its turn when its day was done, back to the beginning. For the people have a right to insist that the land shall be allowed to yield for them as much food as it is capable, under the circumstances of the times, of being made to produce.

The new facts would sap, mine, and explode the old and now inadequate arrangements. And it would not be so much reasonings and opinions that would do this, as facts that had established themselves, and upon which reasonings and opinions would be based. Suppose that from actual, unmistakeable instances it were to become manifest to the general comprehension, that the application of capital to the culture of the land, in such amounts as none but owners of the land will apply to it, would vastly increase the amount of food the land of the country could be made to produce for the people of the country; and that what prevented those who might be ready to apply this amount of capital from becoming owners of the land to which they were ready to apply it, was the power the existing landowners have of charging and settling land, then this power in some way or other would disappear as completely as the Lammas lands &c. have disappeared, and for precisely the same reason. It may seem humiliating, but it must be acknowledged that the material interests of mankind have within themselves much more power for enforcing changes by which they may be promoted, than those interests which are moral and intellectual. The fact is that they come first. Man must live. His moral and intellectual interests are not his primary and most pressing concern. In the order of nature they come afterwards. They are, indeed, hardly seen, or even felt, till the material wants have been supplied.

The mass of mankind appreciates these things according to their natural order. What, for instance, can be more truly shocking than the pauperism of this country? The amount of moral and intellectual degradation it implies, and that in the bosom of a society conspicuous not only for wealth, but also for culture, refinement, and philanthropy, is perhaps the most saddening sight on the face of this earth. Its amount baffles calculation, for it is not to be ascertained by counting the numbers of those unhappy persons in the United Kingdom who are at any particular moment receiving relief, but by adding to their number, could it be done, the number of the present generation who have received, and of those who will receive, relief: for the man who received relief yesterday, and the man who will receive it to-morrow, are as much paupers as the man who is receiving it to-day. The total, therefore, of our pauperized population amounts not to one, but to several millions. Many see this and understand it, but no one is shocked at it. At all events, no one calls aloud for inquiry into the causes of so portentous an evil with a view to its mitigation. Why? because the mass of mankind are little affected, as things now are, at the sight of moral and intellectual degradation. Were they, however, only to be brought to see with distinctness, that the land of the country is, as Lord Derby tells us, producing no more than half as much as it might be made to produce; or, as the Lords’ Committee for inquiring into the means available for improving the land, tells us, that only one fifth of what requires draining has been drained; then everyone would be shocked, and would clamour loudly for inquiries and remedies. It is the abundance free trade supplies, so long as the highways of the sea are open, that is, in these piping times of peace, blinding our eyes to these facts and to their causes, nature, and consequences, and will probably continue to do so, till a maritime war shall have obliged us, when it will be too late, to understand the everyday wisdom of making the most of our own soil. (By the way, why are such committees as that just referred to exceptionally necessary for the land? Ship-builders, cotton-spinners, iron-masters, &c., do not ask for parliamentary inquiry into means for improving their unfettered industries. No one hears of their languishing for want of skill or capital.)

The foregoing sketch of some of the most prominent facts in the history of man’s relation to the land, taking it at the beginning, and bringing it down to the modification of it now existing amongst ourselves, though altogether inadequate as a sketch of the general subject, has occupied more space, I am well aware, than I can claim for anything of the kind here. Still it was quite necessary, for without it we should not be able to assign to the Swiss system its place in the series of advances that have been made in the application and working out of this relation, because without it we should not have had the series before us. Nor without it should we be able to see how honest and successful an attempt the Swiss system was to carry out the substantial purpose of the relation of the land to man, because without it we should not have had our attention directed to the nature of the relation. Nor again, without it, should we be brought to look for the peculiar circumstances upon which the Swiss system had to act, because without it we should not have been brought to see that circumstances are supreme in deciding in what form and fashion the relation itself, and its two efficient conditions of property and association--the three constant quantities in this matter--shall at any time be worked.

As then the substance of the relation is unvarying, and what variation there may be at any time or place can only be in the circumstances, which affect no more than the form of the relation, we have to look in the case now before us for the circumstances which, while other European countries were advancing step after step, in Switzerland, till within a very recent period, prohibited all advance. These, I think, will all be found to be included under two heads, viz., the peculiarities of the physical character of the country, and the absence of accumulations of capital: and the two were, I believe, closely connected. The country had no sources of mineral, nor, under the conditions of former times, of agricultural wealth. It could not maintain a large population on its own resources. Nor could it have any cities, the inhabitants of which, either like those of Flanders, by the easy terms upon which they might get the raw materials, could have manufactured for others, or like those of Venice, Genoa, and of the cities of Holland, might have become common carriers. They could have had no commerce except with their surplus cheese. And the amount of this that could be spared was so small, and the transportation so difficult, that but little could be made of it; and the whole of this little was wanted for the necessaries of labour, such as the useful metals &c. which the Swiss were obliged to procure from abroad. There was therefore no margin for saving, and so there could be no accumulations of capital. For long ages the most assiduous industry could supply the Swiss with only the necessaries of life, and barely with them, even when aided by the surplus cheese. Throughout all this time the system of common pasturage was maintained. It worked well: it saved from perishing a population that was ready to perish.