basal wrong of successions, for the fallacy which perpetually afflicts their reasoning is the assumption that land differs radically from other forms of earthly possessions, and that everything else in the form of wealth can be justly transmitted as a perpetuity.

Let us, then, re-establish the principle that land is community property and the possessor a life-tenant by compelling the reversion to the public of all landed estates on the deaths of their possessors. If there be equities that demand adjustment with those survivors who surround the deathbed, let us deal justly and even mercifully with those who might under existing conditions have been successors; but let us be guided by the principle that no man is entitled to anything unless it is the product of his own efforts, and that he can have no valid claim upon wealth produced in any other way, except through his equal right with other men as one of the community. Compelling in this way a surrender of private control over land and the issuance of a new title by the community, let us adopt such laws as will prevent its being held out of use for speculative purposes when men are so plentiful and opportunities so scarce, for the present destruction of rights to use the earth in this special form is one of the greatest evils of modern civilization.

There will be time enough to elaborate a plan for accomplishing this more general access to land when public. sentiment demands that justice shall be done. When William W. Astor can absolutely control a large part of New York City, and the Duke of Westminster a larger part of London, while the value of the land and buildings is given, not by the moral, mental, or physical efforts of the possessors, nor by any act whatever, good or bad, of theirs, but by the mere existence, desires, and efforts of their surrounding fellow-creatures, above whom Mr. Astor and the Duke are installed as taskmasters and

wealth-dictators, governing all who inhabit those portions of the earth controlled by them and requiring of the occupants tribute; when society grants to these favored sons of Mother Earth the additional power of naming successors in tyranny to rule other people after them; when such palpable, unreasonable, and grossly unnatural wrongs exist among a reading, thinking, and fairly intelligent people, it would seem that no man with a spark of the heavenly fire of justice in his nature can refrain from the denunciation of such iniquity and a vigorous effort to destroy it. One thing is certain awakening intelligence will not long continue a system under which the Dutchman who, according to some of the school histories, once bought Manhattan Island of its Indian inhabitants for a value equivalent to twenty-four dollars, might have placed the city of New York, by the assistance of a few descendants and a few wills, absolutely under the ownership of a single heir. The absurd and outrageous theory of land tenures by which a man may get all he can, keep all he gets, and then transmit his claim to a successor among those who follow him, thus empowering him to live idly and luxuriously off the proceeds of the labor of his less fortunate associates, and to repeat the transfer of his monopoly at the end of his own existence, till, eventually, the many pay tribute to the few for the mere opportunity to live, and breathe, and work on God's footstool, cannot be maintained much longer before the advancing thought of thousands who are now sharply inquiring why they have no privileges and opportunities. Aristocracy with titles in Europe, and aristocracy without titles in the United States will soon have to answer why men claim the divine right of kings to reign by succession, and by what authority they propose to transmit the power to other men.

Among the mountains of California the student of

sociology may any day see a rude and imperfect picture of man's earthly existence in the growth of one of the giant sequoias which have attracted to their shrines of wonder pilgrims from all parts of the world. Towering four hundred feet toward the heavens, the huge tree, thirty feet in diameter at the base, is so vast in its dimensions that no conception of its actual form can be gained except by viewing it from a distance. If we scan the crevices of its outer bark or scrutinize the divisions of its withered foliage in herbariums, our knowledge, however minute, will not give to us an adequate conception of the tree itself. So with the earth of which the great tree is a symbol. If we delve among the trivial minutiæ of earthly life, dissecting this fragment of social existence, and comparing those minute observances of human customs embodied in the hair-splitting practice of the courts, the grand picture of human life and earth itself in their reality will not be revealed to us any more than a clear view of the great sequoia can be obtained by searching the pores of its bark with a microscope.

The history of the sequoia is also like the history of earth, for in the early period of its existence the young giant developed nothing in the form of life transmission from its own substance. It was barren like the earth amid the ancient epochs of its history. There came a time, however, when new life appeared from the bosom of the sequoia, and a time when life developed upon earth-seeds among the branches of the forest giant, man in his early existence on the planet he inhabits. Among the swaying boughs of the great tree thousands of small burrs appear-types of the social groups into which mankind forms. Within the little burrs, millions of tiny seeds maintain life and secure development from the great body of the tree, just as man derives his sustenance from the bosom of Mother Earth. Finally, the little seeds of forest

life, like the little men of a more diversified existence, complete their allotted period of connection with the great life reservoir. The opening burrs assume a brownish tint in the sunbeams that fall upon them, the tiny seeds within their cells darken with advancing age, the folding partitions of their little home turn slowly backward in the drying air, and each little seed is launched outward on an uncertain journey by the rough breath of the autumn wind. What future is to be allotted to the tiny seed which thus drifts down from the high boughs of the great tree, none can tell. We only know that it may contain life, but its future we cannot predict. Perhaps it may become the initial point of a grand progress and existence, perhaps it may have within itself no germ of development, and possibly it may perish in an unfortunate environment near the base of the great column whence it proceeded. As the little seed of the sequoia buds, lives, grows, develops, and, finally, at the termination of its career, begins a new and mysterious progress, so the little earth-seeds which we call men exist during the brief period of a human lifetime, and at its close they are launched into the vast universe surrounding them to achieve can any one reveal what? Is it a new life for the man and the seed, or is it extinction ?

When we reflect upon the helplessness of earthly existence, -how we came here without any volition of our own; how we await the summons of death with no power whatever to prolong our own lives or the existence of those we love; how, with all our civilization and our boasted intellectual development, we cannot even comprehend the life-principle of the little flower crushed beneath our feet, nor tell whence its life really came nor whither it goes; how our minds become tired and confused with a sense of their own imperfections when we attempt to project our thoughts throughout the universe

and to really comprehend the idea of illimitable space and eternity of duration-when we attempt in this way to measure the infinite by the finite, to say how many miles in the distance across God's universe, or how many centuries in the existence of the matter of which the earth is formed, or how much real proprietary claim a sequoiaseed has in the tree which bears it, or a man can obtain in his earthly home-when we have thought of all these things with an honest desire to know all we can of truth, ought we not humbly and reverently, realizing our absurd arrogance, to lay down forever all claims to property in the despotic and unreasonable sense in which men have desired that unjust privilege, and to abandon entirely the tyrannical idea that the future as well as the present is ours to control?

CHAPTER XII.

FROM POVERTY TO WEALTH.

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America lie folded already in the first man. .. Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him. But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his neighbor. Then all goes well. He has changed his market-cart into a chariot of the sun.-R. W. EMERSON.

In this chapter will be presented as briefly as may be consistent with clearness, a survey of those changes in property rights and methods of succession that have preceded the era in which we live, the special object being to explain those mental and physical conditions that have underlain the methods of transferring property from one generation to the next in different stages of civilization. Necessarily, within the narrow limits of this book, such an effort cannot be a history of property and inheritance, for