prejudices to which proprietors are accustomed to appeal, which
legislation has sanctioned, and which the system of labor completely
overthrows.

Reader, were you ever present at the examination of a criminal? Have
you watched his tricks, his turns, his evasions, his distinctions, his
equivocations? Beaten, all his assertions overthrown, pursued like
a fallow deer by the in exorable judge, tracked from hypothesis
to hypothesis,--he makes a statement, he corrects it, retracts it,
contradicts it, he exhausts all the tricks of dialectics, more subtle,
more ingenious a thousand times than he who invented the seventy-two
forms of the syllogism. So acts the proprietor when called upon
to defend his right. At first he refuses to reply, he exclaims, he
threatens, he defies; then, forced to accept the discussion, he
arms himself with chicanery, he surrounds himself with formidable
artillery,--crossing his fire, opposing one by one and all together
occupation, possession, limitation, covenants, immemorial custom, and
universal consent. Conquered on this ground, the proprietor, like a
wounded boar, turns on his pursuers. "I have done more than occupy,"
he cries with terrible emotion; "I have labored, produced, improved,
transformed, CREATED. This house, these fields, these trees are the work
of my hands; I changed these brambles into a vineyard, and this bush
into a fig-tree; and to-day I reap the harvest of my labors. I have
enriched the soil with my sweat; I have paid those men who, had they not
had the work which I gave them, would have died of hunger. No one
shared with me the trouble and expense; no one shall share with me the
benefits."

You have labored, proprietor! why then do you speak of original
occupancy? What, were you not sure of your right, or did you hope to
deceive men, and make justice an illusion? Make haste, then, to acquaint
us with your mode of defence, for the judgment will be final; and you
know it to be a question of restitution.

You have labored! but what is there in common between the labor which
duty compels you to perform, and the appropriation of things in which
there is a common interest? Do you not know that domain over the soil,
like that over air and light, cannot be lost by prescription?

You have labored! have you never made others labor? Why, then, have they
lost in laboring for you what you have gained in not laboring for them?

You have labored! very well; but let us see the results of