The earliest organised form of human society of which we have any clear knowledge is the family. The theories of anthropologists with regard to primitive marriage and to stages of human history antecedent to the institution of the family are highly interesting and important, but they are much a matter of controversy, and they lie outside the purpose of our present enquiry. In a very early stage of man's history as a social being private property was already becoming a recognised institution.

Although the hunting grounds and the game which wandered there were of necessity common to all, yet the weapons of the chase were already tending to become the property of individual members of the family. The growing instinct to acquire property was first exercised upon objects which lay most convenient for appropriation, such as weapons, clothes, shelter. Each act of acquisition gained for the appropriator an advantage in the struggle for existence; the act was repeated, the instinct became hereditary, the power of appropriation became a condition of survival. The necessity of private property has been pressed on man's attention by reason of the conditions by which he is surrounded. It was necessary, however, to create some sanction for this all-important principle. Human ingenuity has invented many explanations. The savage placed the property of his chief under the protection of the ‘taboo.’ The idea of private property, another authority tells us, was first recognised as between blood relations, and was religious in its origin.