The idea of this article was suggested by an anthropological lecture on two aboriginal peoples of the Pacific.

Two peoples, the Andamanese Islanders and the Tikopia, have lived within boating distance of each other for countless generations. The one is semi-nomadic, hunting and fishing. The other is, or was, agricultural. In the first the communal element in the ownership of property is very marked. In the second the private or personal ownership was far more marked.

From this arises a thought. Is it possible that the question of the balance of individual with communal or social rights in the ownership and use of property is not a matter of industrialism, nor of atheism, but chiefly of mobility or immobility of social occupation?

One can follow the idea in many fields: for instance in the Catholic Middle Ages. As the peoples of Europe began to settle, but were yet uncertain and largely mobile and pastoral, they developed the system called feudalism. Feudalism was a kind of socialism, in the sense that the prince, the owner and the employer all three coincided in the person of the feudal lord. All lands were held in trust from him. He was the government. He was the employer in so far as there was an employer outside the subsistence economy of the people who held tenures on his land.

As the people became more and more settled, agricultural, less and and less mobile, in the later Middle Ages and Reformation period, absolute individual tenure of land outside any further responsibility to an overlord became more and more common. The squirearchies appeared, and more and more independent farmers.