the verdict is given by the jury, the prisoner is sentenced by the judge by the same 23 method, and is handed over after sentence to the jailor, who in his turn has to torture him by prescribed mechanical process, knowing maybe nothing of his crime or his history, distinguishing him from his fellow-prisoners not by a name but by a number.
The same thing clearly applies to civil procedure, which is, if anything, of a still more routine character. It guards wealth, not as wealth, but as property only. Thus when it has to deal with the case of a lunatic, its interest lies in preserving his estate while the dealings with his person are put in another and subsidiary category. The difference between this machine law, and the arbitration, according to customary usage, of the chief, or primus inter pares, is sufficiently obvious.
It must now be admitted that no traces exist of any race of mankind living otherwise than in a society of some kind or other; the few examples, in which this was supposed to be the case, proving to be instances not of survival but of degradation. This primitive society at the lowest stage 24 discoverable had little knowledge of tools even when co-operation in matters of detail was considerably advanced. An instance may be given in the act of cultivation before the invention of the spade, where a gang of tillers thrust mere stout sticks into a ridge of earth, and by means of a combined heave turned the soil over. Indeed labour, as far as it went, was, under the conditions of the mere nomadic horde, co-operative. But the beginnings of a greater power over nature, mainly brought about by an advance in the co-operation of labour, produced a more complex form of society, which is the first society of which we have any definite knowledge. The land began to be accepted as the source of the wealth of the community, and as such, whether for pasture or tillage, was recognised as the definite property of the community as against other communities. The right of the individual holding (as opposed to ownership) of Property was based entirely on use, so that there was none that was not common, except the man’s personal gear, such as clothes,