In early societies individual property rights were not very clearly marked.

Every tribe asserted against other tribes, and tried to uphold by war, its claims upon its customary hunting grounds; but the claims of the individual hunters on land within the tribe did not often come into conflict.

Private property at the outset was in personal possessions, ornaments, weapons, utensils, which were very meager in that primitive society in which it was the custom "to go calling with a club instead of a card-case." Only later came individual property in land.

A few years ago it was generally believed that the organization of the old German tribes was politically an almost perfect democracy, and economically a communism in which all had equal claims upon the land.

To-day this opinion is very seriously questioned.