CXVIII.  ORIGIN OF PROPERTY. (410)

Sir William Blackstone, 1723-1780, was the son of a silk merchant, and was born in London.  He studied with great success at Oxford, and was admitted to the bar in 1745.  At first he could not obtain business enough in his profession to support himself, and for a time relinquished practice, and lectured at Oxford.  He afterwards returned to London, and resumed his practice with great success, still continuing to lecture at Oxford.  He was elected to Parliament in 1761; and in 1770 was made a justice of the Court of Common Pleas, which office he held till his death.  Blackstone’s fame rests upon his “Commentaries on the Laws of England,” published about 1769.  He was a man of great ability, sound learning, unflagging industry, and moral integrity.  His great work is still a common text-book in the study of law. ###

In the beginning of the world, we are informed by Holy Writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man dominion over all the earth, and “over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”  This is the only true and solid foundation of man’s dominion over external things, whatever airy, metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject.  The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator.  And while the earth continued bare of inhabitants, it is reasonable to suppose that all was in common among them, and that everyone took from the public stock, to his own use, such things as his immediate necessities required.

These general notions of property were then sufficient to answer all the purposes of human life; and might, perhaps, still have answered them, had it been possible for mankind to have remained in a state of primeval simplicity, in which “all things were common to him.”  Not that this communion of goods seems ever to have been applicable, even in the earliest ages, to aught but the substance of the thing; nor could it be extended to the use of it.  For, by the law of nature and reason, he who first began to use it, acquired therein a kind of transient property, that lasted so long as he was using it, and no longer.  Or, to speak with greater precision, the right of possession continued for the same time, only, that the act of possession lasted.

Thus, the ground was in common, and no part of it was the permanent property of any man in particular; yet, whoever was in the occupation of any determined spot of it, for rest, for shade, or the like, acquired for the time a sort of ownership, from which it would have been unjust and contrary to the law of nature to have driven him by force; but, the instant that he quitted the use or occupation of it, another might seize it without injustice.  Thus, also, a vine or other tree might be said to be in common, as all men were equally entitled to its produce; and yet, any private individual might gain the sole property of the fruit which he had gathered for his own repast:  a doctrine well illustrated by Cicero, who compares the world to a great theater, which is common to the public, and yet the place which any man has taken is, for the time, his own.