Can Experience Teach?

A Word in Season: Messages by R.J. Rushdoony on the Faith for All of Life · May 25, 2026 · 4m

A traveler in Europe in 1959 discovered a farming valley dying not because the soil was poor or young men were unwilling, but because inherited customs had chopped property into absurd fragments, destroying ownership and driving families away. A woman slept in one house, had the right to meals in another, and could warm herself only in a third; some farmers legally owned one-eighth of their own land. Such laws doomed the valley to be empty within a generation. This problem is ancient: Rome, as historian Guglielmo Ferrero noted, died from excessive urbanization crushing farmers with controls…