s cultivator. That was
all that he had a right to expect; that was all that the advance of
civilization demanded. But property, property! the right of escheat over
lands which one neither occupies nor cultivates,--who had authority to
grant it? who pretended to have it?

"Agriculture alone was not sufficient to establish permanent property;
positive laws were needed, and magistrates to execute them; in a word,
the civil State was needed.

"The multiplication of the human race had rendered agriculture
necessary; the need of securing to the cultivator the fruit of his labor
made permanent property necessary, and also laws for its protection. So
we are indebted to property for the creation of the civil State."

Yes, of our civil State, as you have made it; a State which, at first,
was despotism, then monarchy, then aristocracy, today democracy, and
always tyranny.

"Without the ties of property it never would have been possible to
subordinate men to the wholesome yoke of the law; and without permanent
property the earth would have remained a vast forest. Let us admit,
then, with the most careful writers, that if transient property, or
the right of preference resulting from occupation, existed prior to
the establishment of civil society, permanent property, as we know it
to-day, is the work of civil law. It is the civil law which holds that,
when once acquired, property can be lost only by the action of
the proprietor, and that it exists even after the proprietor has
relinquished possession of the thing, and it has fallen into the hands
of a third party.

"Thus property and possession, which originally were confounded, became
through the civil law two distinct and independent things; two things
which, in the language of the law, have nothing whatever in common. In
this we see what a wonderful change has been effected in property, and
to what an extent Nature has been altered by the civil laws."

Thus the law, in establishing property, has not been the expression of a
psychological fact, the development of a natural law, the application of
a moral principle. It has literally CREATED a right outside of its own
province. It has realized an abstraction, a metaphor, a fiction; and
that without deigning to look at the consequences, without considering
the disadvantages, without inquiring whether it was right or wrong.

It has sanctioned selfishness; it has indorsed monstrous pretensions;
it has received with favor i