SWISS VILLAGE COMMUNITIES.*

IT was Mr. Freeman, we believe, who first in this country directed attention to the relies of early Teutonic institutions extant in German Switzerland. Ho was most struck by their political aspect. He found in Uri, Unterwalden, Glarus, and Appenzell the old Teutonic free assembly, almost as fresh as his historical spirit could have imagined it, living on through the rise and fall of empires, and only disturbed in the tranquil Alpine valleys in our own restless, inquiring, and levelling time. Still more interesting perhaps than the political aspect of this survival of the old Teutonic democracy are the agrarian cus- toms found in connection with it, which the author of the pre- sent work has submitted to special and careful study. We may remind our readers that the early history of the in- stitution of property n land has for some years engaged the attention of a large class of historical writers, legists, and economists. Primitive institutions first discovered to sur- vive in India and the South-Slavoniau countries have been found to exist, more or less modified, in all parts of Europe. G. L. von Maurer has shown how they explain the facts of modern German land-tenure, and Professor Nasse, of Bonn, has hurprised our own countrymen by showing the light they throw on the early English property system, and the solu-. tion they give of puzzles which had perplexed our feudal lawyers. Sir Henry Maine has collected the information sup- plied by these and other Continental scholars and in the light of their discoveries has discussed the early history of Roman Law, examined for himself the relics of old agrarian usages in India, and explored very successfully the recently translated manuscripts of Irish Brehon law, His clear exposi- tion of the facts gleaned from these sources, the ingenious speculations and arguments by which lie has connected and combined them, his scholarly and brilliant style, have given a charm to all ho has written on the subject, and have made it familiar to a large class of readers who would have been re- pelled by ordinary books on similar topics. Thanks above all to him, it is now generally known or admitted in Eng- land that, in far distant parts of the globe, institutions bearing marks of great age show that the idea of private Property in land, is not by any means the innate conception it was supposed to be before the investigations to which we have referred had been made. The principles by which we have to explain the phenomena of early law are now understood, but it remains to apply the new science to the historical tracing, so to speak, of vestiges of the past, which crop up beneath existing

institutions in different parts of the globe. One of the richest fields of study in this department is presented by the older Swiss Cantons, and the task of exploring them, and every possible documentary evidence relating to them, has been undertaken by Dr. von Miaskowski, of the University of Basle. The work of which the title is given below, is the first instalment of a greater book on the de- velopment of the agrarian constitution in the Swiss valleys. The subject is to such an extent still in its infancy, that any book

Die Verfassung der Land-Arpen end ForstudrthacheVi der detasehen &Meets. Von Dr. A. von Miaskowski. Basle U. Georg. 1876. on it must be gratefully welcomed. But the present author has not written without being qualified for the task he has under-

taken, and it is not one of his slightest recommendations that he is an accomplished economist of the younger German school. He has the historical feeling which renders that school the fittest class of investigators to deal with questions of early property.

It would be manifestly out of the question to try to sum- marise the contents of the book. A history is not like an argument, and cannot be condensed into an article. We must, therefore, confine ourselves to selecting one or two of the more original and striking passages of the work ; and that which has most struck us is the description of the primitive village, derived. from information contained in documents of the thirteenth century. We must first, however, endeavour to realise a state of society in which the idea of any one person having exclusive right to any portion of the soil on which all depend for sub- sistence has not yet arisen. Common property in land appeara to have been AB natural to a past state of society as private property is to the present ago, the household, its homestead; and. the therein involved private property always being, however, the point of departure of the early system of society, as revealed in the Swiss records. Professor von Miaskowski describes the early Swiss village as follows :—

"The homestead consisted of the dwelling and the necessary outhouses, aud of a surrounding sprier) closed in by a hedge, and thereby separated from the neighbouring homesteads. In the sur- rounding space was the kitchen-garden, or a grass-plot and orchard, or both. Sometimes a portion of it would be reserved for the young cattle and other animals, for which the common meadow was not

suitable A. number of these hedged-in homesteads formed the village In like manner, the whole village was enclosed

by a hedge, or rather thicket, wherever the hedges of the outlying homesteads did not render a common enclosure unnecessary. The en- trances were provided with lift-doors. Within the common enelosure and between the different homesteads was common grass-land, for cattle to graze upon, provided with wells, &c. Beyond the outside thicket lay the corn-fields.' In the districts where • the three-field system prevailed they were divided into three parts, within each of which different crops were grown, according to the position and quality of the soil ; and of these crops, each homestead had an allot- ment. Between the different parts, and oven between the different crops in low-lying, damp places, extended the meadows. Thwards these the corn land, more or less regularly distributed round the vil- lage, was in turn enclosed Beyond this outer enclosure began the almond, tho common march (mark), again bounded off towards neighbouring villages and districts by hedges or other signs, wherever the line of demarcation was not clearly defined by nature."

This agrarian system of the older Swiss Cantons, the author tells us, had so firm a foundation. that, notwithstanding the great changes in social life, and the destructive tendencies at work in its neighbourhood, much of it survived little altered from the thirteenth century, that is, from the date back to. which his inquiry extends down to the middle of the eighteenth cen-

tury, and in many spots even down to our own- time., its peculiar and enduring characteristic is the co-operative associa-

tion of all the landowners in a given district :—

" This organisation is as distinct from the present- system of cultivation, bused essentially on exclusively private property and the greatest possible individual freedom, as it is from the system without individual freedom and private property in land or circulating capitakat lenst, so far as both serve as means of produc- tion), which Socialism looks forward to. The ce-operatimorganisa- tion we meet with in our records certainly restrained the individual will to an extent little in harmony with our modern ideas of liberty ; still, it was based partly on the in certain respects limited private property, alongside which the common propeity existed as a factor of at least equal right, and within. these limits the individual enjoyed all freedom of movement. Nor is it to be confused with the modern Co-operative Association, which is, a form of enterprise supported by private means, whereas the agrarian village commune of the middle- ages implied the joint cultivation of all the homesteads comprised in it."

It would, we repeat, be impossible, much as we should like to do so, inthe necessarily limited space at our disposal, to follow Professor Miaskowslci through all the stages by which this primitive village has passed away. From the above extract, an idea may be formed of the information to be obtained re- specting early institutions from the study of the Swiss com-

munities. It is easy to imagine how the unsettled conditions which followed the Reformation, the gradual immigration of

strangers, the creation of classes, and the formation of guildn,. tended to destroy these harmonious communities of tillers of the soil. What traces of them are left in Europe are little more than vestiges of an extinct state of society, fading so rapidly that no time should be lost in putting on record all that can be learned concerning them. As regards the explanation of the pm-poses, so to speak, which underlay the structure of the

early village, and the rise of the Swiss forestry, we must refer the reader to the work itself.