habitation, have nevertheless not only maintained, but also increased their power, partly by the labour of trading from one place to another, and partly by selling the manufactures whereof the materials were brought in from other places.
The distribution of the materials of this nourishment, is the constitution of “mine,” and “thine,” and “his”; that is to say, in one word “propriety”; and belongeth in all kinds of commonwealth to the sovereign power. For where there is no commonwealth there is, as hath been already shown, a perpetual war of every man against his neighbour; and therefore everything is his that getteth it, and keepeth it by force; which is neither “propriety” nor “community”; but “uncertainty.” Which is so evident, that even Cicero, a passionate defender of liberty, in a public pleading, attributeth all propriety to the law civil. “Let the civil law,” saith he, “be once abandoned, or but negligently guarded, not to say oppressed, and there is nothing, that any man can be sure to receive from his ancestor, or leave to his children.” And again, “Take away the civil law, and no man knows what is his own, and what another man’s.” Seeing therefore the introduction of “propriety” is an effect of commonwealth, which can do nothing but by the person that represents it, it is the act only of the sovereign; and consisteth in the laws, which none can make that have not the sovereign power. And this they well knew of old, who called that Νόμος , that is to say, “distribution,” which we call law; and defined justice, by “distributing” to every man “his own.”
In this distribution, the first law is for division of the land itself: wherein the sovereign assigneth to every man a portion, according as he, and not according as any subject, or any number of them, shall judge agreeable to equity, and the common good. The children of Israel were a commonwealth in the wilderness; but wanted the commodities of the earth, till they were masters of the Land of Promise; which afterwards was divided amongst them, not by their own discretion, but by the discretion of Eleazar the Priest and Joshua their General, who, when