11. Cases, however, are quoted in which villages have renounced periodic partition. M. Kinder de Camareeq, formerlyresident in Java, mentions a dessa in the country of Kadoe, where the cultivators have introduced a new system of landedproperty more like the principle of allodial property than that of communal property. (See Tydschrift voor Indische taal-land- en volkenkunde , x. 290) In other districts, especially in the provinces of Madura and Cheribon, the system of collectiveproperty has been recently introduced or generalized. In Manilla, in the cultivated parts of the island, the system of individualproperty has supplanted collective property, but there remain numerous traces of the old agrarian organization. -- See J.
Wiselins, Een bezoet aan Manila , La Hague, 1875.
12. See Revue Javanaise : Tydeschrift van het Indisch landbouw-genootschap , 1873, no. 3. Landbouw-wetgeving .
13. Strabo, l. xv. c. I. 66.
14. Mountstuart Elphinstone, History of India , 5th Edition, pp. 71-72, 263.
15. Tenure of Land in India, in Systems of Land Tenure in various Countries , published by the Cobden Club in 1870.
16. Sir H. Maine, however, tells us that, in the central provinces, "there are examples of the occasional removal of the entirearable mark from one part of the village domain to another, and of the periodical redistribution of lots within the cultivatedarea. There is no information of any systematic removal, and still less of any periodical re-partition of the cultivated lands,when the cultivators are of Aryan origin. But... though the practice of redistribution may be extinct, the tradition of such apractice often remains, and the disuse of it is sometimes complained of as a grievance. In English influence has had anythingto do with arresting customs of repartition, which are, no doubt, quite alien to English administrative ideas, it is a freshexample of destructive influence, unwillingly and unconsciously exercised... The probability, however, is that the causes havehad their operation much hastened by the English, but have not been created by them."17. In an article in the Contemporary Review , May, 1872, On Village Communities , M. Nasse mentions, on the authority ofMr Williams' Archaeologia , a manor, in which the meadows, divided into parts or hams , were annually allotted among theinhabitants. Of these parts, one was called the Smith's ham ; another the Steward's ham ; and another the Constable's ham .
The old English register, the Boldan Book , dating from 1163, speaks of craftsmen and indicates the portion of land theyreceived for their services; -- thus N. N. faber tenet 6 acras pro sevitio suo . There is the same custom in Java and in India.
See art. De Gids already quoted, and Maine's Village Community .
18. See an excellent sketch of the Hindoo village in Karl Marx' Das Capital , 1873, p. 370. Cf. also Lieut.-Col. Mark Wills' Historical Sketches of the South of India , London, 1810, Vol. I. p. 118; and Sir George Campbell's Modern India .
Chapter 5
The Allemends of Switzerland (1)
In the primitive cantons of Switzerland, institutions of the most democratic character conceivable have secured theinhabitants from the most remote times in the enjoyment of liberty, equality and order, and as great a degree of happiness asis compatible with human destinies. This exceptional good fortune is attributable to the fact, that ancient communalinstitutions have been preserved, and with them the primitive communal ownership.
The French revolution committed the error, every day more apparent, of endeavouring to found democracy by crushing theonly institutions which can make it possible. It set up abstract man, the isolated individual, and theoretically recognized inhim all his natural rights, but at the same time annihilated everything that could attach him to preceding generations, or to hisexisting fellow-citizens, -- the province with its traditional liberties, the commune with its undivided property, and the craftsand corporations, which united in a bond of brotherhood workmen of the same trade. These associations, the naturalextension of the family, had sheltered the individual: though perhaps sometimes a fetter, they were always a support; whilebinding men down, they also strengthened them; they were the hive in which individual life was carried on. In times ofadversity there was a guarantee of assistance; in ordinary times, a supervision which kept men in the right path, a power ofdefence when their rights were attacked, and a tradition for new generations. The present was connected with the past bythe privileges and advantages derived from the institution. In modern days the individual is lost within the nation, an abstractidea which is only realized for most of us under the form of the receiver who demands the taxes, or the conscription whichimposes military service. The commune has lost all local autonomy, and is become a mere wheel in the machinery ofadministration, obedient to a central power. Communal property in almost every case has been sold or diminished. Man,coming into the world with wants to be satisfied, and with hands to labour, can claim no share in the soil for the exercise ofhis energy. Industrial crafts are no more: the joint-stock compares which have taken their place are a means of associatingcapital not men. Religion, a powerful bond of union, has lost most of its fraternal power; and the family, shaken to thefoundation, is little more than a system of succession. Man is a social creature; and the institutions have been destroyed orweakened in which his sociability could express itself and form a solid basis for the state.
