III.
The village community was composed, as it still is, of separate families; but the families of a village possessed the land in common. They looked upon it as their common patrimony and allotted it according to the size of the families. Hundreds of millions of men live still under this system in Eastern Europe, India, Java, etc. It is the same system that Russian peasants have established nowadays, when the State left them free to occupy the immense Siberian territory as they thought best.
At first the cultivation of the land was also done in common, and this custom still obtains in many places—at least, the cultivation of certain plots of land. As to deforestation and clearings made in the woods, construction of bridges, building of fortlets and turrets which served as refuge in case of invasion, they were done in common—as hundreds of millions of peasants still do—wherever the village commune has resisted State encroachments. But consumption, to use a modern expression, already took place by family—each having its own cattle, kitchen garden and provisions; the means of hoarding and transmitting wealth accumulated by inheritance already existed.
In all its business, the village commune was sovereign. Local custom was law and the plenary council of all chiefs of families—men and women—was judge, the only judge, in civil and criminal affairs. When one of the inhabitants, complaining of another, planted his knife in the ground at the spot where the commune was wont to assemble, the commune had to "find the sentence" according to local custom, after the fact had been proved by the jurors of both litigant parties.
Time would fail me were I to tell you everything of interest presented by this stage. Suffice it for me to observe that all institutions, which States took possession of later on for the benefit of minorities, all notions of right which we find in our codes (mutilated to the advantage of minorities), and all forms of judicial procedure, in as far as they offer guarantees to the individual, had their origin in the village community. Thus, when we imagine we have made great progress in introducing the jury, for example,—we have only returned to the institution of the barbarians, after having modified it to the advantage of the ruling classes. Roman law was only superposed to customary law.
The sentiment of national unity was developing at the same time, by great free federations of village communes.
Based on the possession, and very often on the cultivation of the soil in common, sovereign as judge and legislator of customary law, the village community satisfied most needs of the social being.
