If, on the other hand, it could be shown that
before the advent of a complex civilization Europeans had no conception
of private property in land, but treated land as a thing necessarily and
always communal, then you could ascribe modern Socialist theories with
regard to the land to that general movement of harking back to the
origins which Europe has been assisting at through over a hundred years
of revolution and of change.
It sounds cynical, but it is perfectly true, that much the largest
factor in the historical conception of men is assertion. It is literally
true that when men (with the exception of a very small proportion of
scholars who are also intelligent) consider the past, the picture on which
they dwell is a picture conveyed to them wholly by authority and by
unquestioned authority. There was never a time when the original sources
of history were more easily to be consulted by the plain man; but whether
because of their very number, or because the habit is not yet formed, or
because there are traditions of imaginary difficulty surrounding such
reading, original sources were perhaps never less familiar to fairly
educated opinion than they are today; and therefore no type of book gives
more pleasure when one comes across it than those little cheap books, now
becoming fairly numerous, in which the original sources, and the
original sources alone, are put before the reader.
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