St. Benedict, cap. xlviii. concerning daily manual labour, prescribes the proportions of time to be employed in labour, in study, and in devotion; and adds, "But if poverty or local causes require them to labour by themselves in harvest-work, &c., let them not think it a grievance, for then are they truly monks, if they live by the labour of their own hands, as did also our fathers and the apostles:" and, greatly as they departed from the design of their institution, the monastic orders may nevertheless furnish valuable proofs of the success with which the affairs of communities may be ma

dicti, Cap. xxiii. “Si quid debeant Monachi proprium habere.”

"Sicut scriptum est: Dividebatur singulis, prout cuique opus erat, ubi non dicimus, ut personarum, quod absit, acceptio sit, sed infirmitatum consideratio. Ubi qui minus indiget agat Deo gratias, et non contristetur. Qui vero plus indiget humilietur pro infirmitate, et non extollatur pro misericordia: et ita omnia membra erunt in pace."-Ibid. Cap. xxiv. "Si omnes æqualiter debeant necessaria accipere."

Respecting Labour.

"Quod si labor forte factus fuerit major, in arbitrio Abbatis erit aliquid augere, remota præ omnibus crapula ut nunquam subrepat Monacho indigeries: quia nihil sic contrarium est omni Chris tiano, quomodo crapula, sicut ait Dominus noster: Videte ne graventur corda vestra in crapula et ebrietate."-Ibid. Cap.

xxxix. "De Mensura Ciborum."

“Quod si aut loci necessitas, vel labor, aut ardor æstatis amplius poposcerit," &c. -Ibid. Cap. xl. "De Mensura Potûs."

"Si labores agrorum non habent Monachi si opera in agris habuerint." Ibid. Cap. xli.; see also xlvi.

"Certis temporibus occupari debent fratres in labore manuum; certis horis in lectione divina. [Then follows a division of their time.] Si autem necessitas loci, aut paupertas exegerit ut ad fruges colligendas per se occupentur, non contristentur: quia tunc vere monachi sunt, si labore manuum suarum vivunt: sicut et Patres nostri et Apostoli. Omnia tamen mensurate fiant, propter pusillanimes."-Ibid. Cap. xlviii. "De Opere Manuum quotidiano."

"Fratres qui omnino longe sunt in labore, et non possunt occurrere hora competenti ad Oratorium,-agant ibidem opus Dei ubi operantur, cum tremore

naged, and how literature, science and the arts may thrive without any stimulus of private emolument. Let it also be remembered, that while in the middle ages the care of the poor, and of education, and the duties of hospitality, devolved principally upon them, they were eminently successful in agriculture, drainage and embankment, architecture, and various works of public utility. +

Disgust at the corruption of the monks might well create in the minds of the first favourers of the Reformation an aversion to Coenobitism or conventual life, which scarcely retained any traces of its first design: although, having continued in the church from the institute of the apostles in a constant succession, its perversions were no better reason for rejecting it as a Christian ordinance, than those of the mass for rejecting the Lord's Supper. The religious revolution in this country, indeed, was mainly assisted by the division of the spoils of the Church among its partisans, which seems to have given rise to a system of public robbery and embezzlement of endowments that has continued to the present time. And under this head may also be ranked the conversion of the common lands into private property, by inclosure bills, to which may be justly applied the words of holy writ:

Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed; to turn aside the needy from judgment, and to take away the right from the poor of my people.-Hear this, O ye that swallow up the needy, even to make the poor of the land to fail. Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there is no place; that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!" What

divino ffectentes genua."-Ibid. Cap. 1. "De Fratribus qui longe ab Oratorio laborant.”

* The great accumulation of their wealth is to be attributed to the advantageous plan of a community, more than to any other cause.

"In the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great power for the mechanism of politic benevolence."Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Society of Harmony in America are more or less founded on this principle: but though all the ancient churches paid homage to the Christian proscription of private property, it is to be feared that in the Reformed Churches a worldly, money-getting spirit is very much the characteristic of those who consider themselves as the godly.

Among the causes that have prevented the general adoption of the primitive suggestion of a Community of Goods, may be reckoned the want of any practicable plan to carry it into effect, and of a sufficient extension and preponderance of the genuine spirit of Christianity to make it lasting. This, however, need not excite our surprise, as it appears to have been the plan of Providence that Christianity should produce its effects gradually, and in co-operation with the efforts of human reason and the improvement of knowledge; leaving room for the exertions of mankind to carry into effect its divine suggestions. And for any successful attempt to rid society of the evils of the system of private property, we must look, not as some have done to a return to a state of nature, but to a progress in refinement and civilization. The necessary arrangements can only take rise from increased knowledge of human nature and of the art of governing. The system of private

boor presents a scene of filth and discomfort. His house has neither tree, shrub, nor a blade of grass near it.-The interior is as slovenly as its exterior accompaniments." (A most forbidding description follows.) "Yet this man is probably the owner of 6000 head of cattle and 5000 sheep. He lords it over the kraal of Hottentots with the power of a feudal chief. He neither ploughs nor plants vineyards; his habits are slovenly, and he neglects the decencies of life.-If he carries enough butter, soap, ostrich feathers, and skins, to purchase in return a little coffee, brandy, and gunpowder, the purpose of journey and his life is

answered."

Quarterly Review, Vol. XXII. p. 227.

The late attempts of emigrants to settle in the deserts of America and the Cape appear to fail miserably from having been made on the system of individual property. A community is the only plan for speedily converting the wilderness into an abode of social happiness.

property belongs rather to the savage* than the civilized state; or is, at least, but the first step towards civilization. To appropriate to himself all that he can, is the instinct of the savage: to prevent the contentions to which this propensity would give rise was the origin of laws, so that it may perhaps be more truly said that law is the creature of property, than that property is the creature of law. No doubt the institution of Private Property has been a great stimulus to improvements in the progress of man from a barbarous to a civilized state: but it by no means follows, that when a certain degree of civilization has been attained, he may not gradually lay aside this system; the existing stock of knowledge now enabling him to adopt a more perfect one.

I see no reason to adopt the opinion of those who think that if Christianity were universal, and had its due influence on the minds of all men, it would wholly supersede the necessity of civil government, and produce such a state of things that there would be no need either for laws or magistrates. As long as men, as social beings, are dependent on each other, and capable of deriving good or ill from mutual intercourse and assistance; so long it would seem necessary that some system should exist by which this intercourse may be regulated, and by its improvement made to produce the greatest sum of happiness within their reach. For, supposing that all the members of a society were influenced by the most kind and Christian spirit, yet would they, for want of wisdom and experience, and a skilful system of polity, not only fail of effecting all that might be done for the common weal, but perhaps fall into such mistakes and inconveniences as would produce a state of things destructive of those very principles and dispositions which it has been imagined might render civil government altogether unnecessary.

Nec commune bonum poterant spectare, neque ullis Moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti.

Quod cuique obtulerat prædæ fortuna, ferebat,

Sponte sua, sibi quisque valere et vivere doctus.-Lucret. Lib. v.

Besides which, it seems probable, that even for this complete dominion of Christian motives, we may have to be indebted to progressive improvements in education and government, conjointly with the intrinsic power and excellence of Christianity.

Those who assert the impracticability of any plans of this kind forget how much institutions respecting property have varied, and that society has actually existed under various modifications of them. The accumulation of landed property was guarded against under the Jewish Theocracy by the divine institution of the jubilee every 50th year, when all the lands which had been sold or alienated, were re-divided among the people. Levit. xxv. 23: "The land shall not be sold for ever, for the land is inine," &c. And in the Sabbatical year the produce of the land was to be common to all, and debts were to be remitted. (See Belsham's Sermon on the Jubilee.) Those who are disposed to consider the Mosaic as typical of the Christian dispensation, may easily discover, in the Sabbatical and Jubilee years, a type of the abolition of private property under the gospel. In some parts even of this country the laws are much less conducive to the accumulation of landed property than in others, and many changes, though mostly for the worse, have been made with respect to the tenure and descent of property: we hear much of the danger of innovations on private property, but little is said against the scandalous conversion of public into private property. A great part, perhaps all, of our lands were formerly shack lands, of which the occupant had the use only whilst his crop was on, the land then reverting to the community for pasturage. Even now the meer-bauks that separate the lands belong to the community, and the occupier of two adjoining fields has no right to plough up the meer-bauk between them." All the lands in a district called the Theel-land, lying in the bailiwic of Norden and Bertum," says a writer in the Edinburgh Review, are held by a very extraordinary tenurewe speak in the present tense, for the customs of the Theel-land were subsisting in 1805, and we do not suppose that they have since become obsolete. The

VOL. XVI.

.

Agrarian law, elsewhere a phantom, either lovely or terrific, according to the imagination of the spectator, is here fully realized. The land is considered as being divided into portions or Theels, each containing a stated quantity: the owners are called Theelmen, or Theel-boors; but no Theelboor can hold more than one Theel in severalty. The undivided, or common land, comprising the Theels not held by individuals, belongs to all the inhabitants of the Theel-land, and is cultivated or farmed out on their joint account. The Theel-boor cannot sell his hereditary Theel, or alienate it in any way, even to his nearest relations. On his death it descends to his youngest son. If there are no sons it descends to the youngest daughter, under the restrictions after mentioned; and in default of issue it reverts to the commonalty. But elder sons are not left destitute: when they are old enough to keep house, a Theel is assigned to each of them (be they ever so many) out of the common lands, to be held to them and their issue, according to the customary tenure. If a woman who has inherited a Theel becomes the wife of a Theel-boor, who is already in possession of a Theel, then her land reverts to the commonalty."

In the degree of civilization hitherto attained, law has interfered only to prevent the perpetration of violence and the grosser kinds of fraud † in the acquisition of property, and to regulate in various ways its possession and conveyance. To equalize as much as possible the gifts of Providence amongst all, however consonant to reason, benevolence, and Christianity, has been scarcely at all its object. The progress of improvement, and a sense of

* Edinburgh Review, No. LXIII., for July 1819, p. 10, on the Laws of Friesland. For a most interesting account of this district, and of the happiness and prosperity prevailing in it in consequence of this system, see also Travels in the North of Germany, by Mr. Hodgkins.

See also Tacitus de Moribus Germanorum, Cap xxxvi.

+ Chiefly, however, frauds which affect the rich. Those which are committed by them upon the poorer classes do not even incur reproach.

mutual advantage have, however, induced societies of men to unite for purposes which have this tendency: such are insurances, benefit societies, and all those institutions whose object it is to obviate the inequalities of fortune, and to lessen the weight of calamity by sharing it among a numerous association. The progress of knowledge and true civilization will tend to unite men in contriving the general security and welfare by mutual cooperation, and in discovering such laws and regulations as will enable all the members of any society to partake as much as possible of its wealth.

We are all ready to allow that the superfluities of the rich, "for which men swinck and sweat incessantly," give them no increase of enjoyment, while they in their waste consume the comforts of the majority: and yet we are blindly attached to a system necessarily productive of a state of things, which the Jewish revelation has censured, which poets and philosophers have always deplored, and which Christianity has fully condemned. If the prayer be a proper one, Give me neither poverty nor riches, lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor and steal, and take the name of my God in vain," then is that constitution of things the best which does not expose men to these hurtful extremes, to the evils occasioned by the lubricity of fortune, and to the pernicious influence of avarice and selfish ambition, of which the poet has given us too true a picture : "Some thought to raise themselves to high degree

By Riches and unrighteous reward; Some by close should'ring; some by flatteree;

Others through friends; others for base regard;

grow;

But every one did strive his fellow downe to throw.

Faerie Queene, b. ii. c. 7.

It may be unnecessary for me to add, that I consider both Wallace and Malthus as admitting the advantages of a community of goods, were it not for the danger of such an increase of mankind under the happy state which it would produce, that the world would not hold them, and that they must starve or eat one another; to prevent which catastrophe (according to the latter) the Creator has no better resource than to keep down their numbers by perpetuating vice and misery among them or, as the Attorney-General of Chester lately expressed it, "There could be no doubt that poverty was the doom of heaven for the great majority of mankind." To such an objection I think no regard need be paid.

It was my intention to have considered the manifold ills which are alleged to have their source in the system of private property, and to take notice of the plans which have been proposed, or put in practice for superseding it : I

must, however, content myself with referring to the publications of that zealous and unwearied philanthropist Mr. Robert Owen of Lanark; wherein, in addition to those plans of his own which it were much to be wished should undergo a careful trial, he details those which have been proposed or carried into execution by several individuals and societies. † I shall

This essay was written before Mr. Godwin's clear and satisfactory refutation of the theory of Mr. Malthus had appeared; but its entire incompatibility with the Divine goodness was enough to convince us that it would prove false.

+ See "A New View of Society, by Robert Owen, Esq., of New Lanark." See also "Muratori's Account of the Government of the Jesuits in Paraguay;"" Remarks on the Practicability of Mr. Owen's Plan to improve the Condition of the