Dr. Arnold observes: "So much does the right of property go along with labour, that civilized nations have never scrupled to take possession of countries inhabited only by tribes of savages, countries which have been hunted over, but never subdued or cultivated." Vattel, the greatest authority upon international law, is adduced as favourable to the same side from the fact that, while condemning the occupation of land already inhabited, he mildly observes: "One does not, then, exceed the views of nature, in restricting savages to narrower limits." These words are interpreted into seizure in full.
Mr. Hepworth Dixon discusses the question of the Indian right to the soil thus: "The soil! they have no soil. The soil was no more to them than the sea and the sky are to us. A right to go over it they claimed; but to own it and preserve it against the intrusion of all other men, is a claim which the Red man has never made, and which, if they should learn to make it, should never be allowed by civilized men. No hunting tribe has any such right; perhaps no hunting tribe can have such right, for, in strict political philosophy, the only exclusive right which any man can acquire in land, the gift of nature, is that which he creates for himself, by what he puts, into it by way of labour and investment, alike for his own and for the common good."
This argument has been applied in two other ways. The holding of great quantities of land, kept only for park or hunting purposes, has been regarded by others as opposed to the law of nature, and a revolution has furnished the occasion of confiscating some of this waste land, that it may be applied to more productive utilitarian ways. So long as this law was made applicable to savages it was held legitimate, but denied when pressed into the service of either English or French reformers. But, in Australia, the argument has been directed to the displacement of squatters, as the pressure of population has rendered necessary. They have had their runs in part or whole taken from them, and cut up into farms for cultivation by another class. The squatter has resented the application of the argument as unjust in principle.
Turning to the other side—the right of the Aborigines to their land—we find some good authorities.
Grotius, the learned jurist, denies the right of one people to seize the uncultivated lands of another. Lord Bacon wrote: "I
