THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY IN RUSSIA.* THIS little volume, which might
more properly be called" The Origin of Property in Land," attempts to present to the English reader a summary of the exceedingly valuable evidence which recent studies of rural life in Russia and Siberia have brought to light bearing upon the history of the village com- munity. But Mr. Lewinski is not content with a mere summary of the achievements of other students ; he has made a detailed investigation of relevant official documents on his own account and reduced the whole evidence to a series of very interesting conclusions. In the result he is led into a position absolutely the reverse of the classical theory of Maine and his followers, which denied the exist- ence of a title by occupancy amongst primitive peoples and traced the origin of property to some form of communal ownership.
According to Mr. Lewinski, the human race passes from a nomadic state in which property is practically unknown, to a scattered form of settlement which reaches a high state of development before the village community begins to take shape. The origin of property is, he says, in all cases due to two causes, the incorporation of labour with the soil and " individual scarcity." Both of these causes operate to create individual occupation. At first meadows and forests are used freely by everyone. Then with the increase of population (which pro- vides throughout the motive force) comes the transition to agriculture, and the cultivator grows unwilling to surrender either the land on which he has expended his labour or that which is of unique value to him owing to its proximity to his homestead—or, to use Mr. Lewinski's phrase, its "individual scarcity." But increase of numbers continues to operate, and there soon becomes apparent an inequality in division of property which creates a large discontented
• The Origin of Property. By Jan St. Lewinski. Landau: Constable and Co. Pat CAL net.]
class of landless people. To meet this difficulty there begins a process of redistribution which leads by an inevitable coarse of development to the establishment of the village community. The propositions have, when thus baldly enun- ciated, rather an abstract and formal air, but Mr. Lewinski recognizes clearly enough that the course of develop- ment which he indicates may vary indefinitely, in rate of progress and adjustment of elements, according to the circumstances of the particular community involved. The interesting point about his investigations is the way in which the evidence collected shows his principles operating in detail when applied to different classes of property and different circumstances of situation. Thus he finds it universally tree that, although pasture-meadows which are manured and drained immediately become hereditary pro- perty, others on which no such labour has been expended remain free so long as the supply continues abundant. Some- times simple enclosure is enough to give ownership, and there are cases where even forest is regarded as appropriated to the person who expends labour in protecting it from fire. It is even observed that the degree of certainty of the proprietary right varies directly with the amount of labour put into the soil. In good years the meadows are used quite freely, in times of bad crops they are divided among the community, while, in a scattered settlement system, land near the home- stead is appropriated to the house-owner, whether it be meadow-pasture or forest.
The apparent universality of these principles has led Mr. Lewinski to lay it down as en axiom that, granted the operation in any given case of the " economic principle " man's desire for the greatest possible satisfaction of his wants with the least possible trouble), the increase of population (making allowance for variations of circumstance) inevitably drives the community through the same stages of development. In his introduction he tells us that he approached his investiga- tion with the presumption that man is always actuated by the economic principle, and this is as much as to say that he regards his laws as universal. So far we can perhaps as yet hardly follow him To establish this would require a far wider and more exhaustive study of the evidence than his book is able to give ns. Nor need we perhaps be convinced that the older theory is yet finally and universally displaced. Mr. Lewinski himself quotes in support of this view a passage from Pollock and Maitland's Legal History, which, if considered with the context, will hardly bear the construction he puts upon it. May we refer him to another passage almost from the same page of that work?—" To suppose that the family law of every nation must needs traverse the same route, this is an unwarrantable hypothesis. To construct some fated scheme of successive stages which shall comprise every arrangement that may be discovered among backward peoples, this is a hopeless task."
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