extended it to every individual; if
it had declared that the right of labor, like liberty, can never be
forfeited,--at that moment the revolution would have been consummated,
and we could now devote ourselves to improvement in other directions.

% 2.--Universal Consent no Justification of Property.

In the extract from Say, quoted above, it is not clear whether the
author means to base the right of property on the stationary character
of the soil, or on the consent which he thinks all men have granted
to this appropriation. His language is such that it may mean either
of these things, or both at once; which entitles us to assume that the
author intended to say, "The right of property resulting originally from
the exercise of the will, the stability of the soil permitted it to be
applied to the land, and universal consent has since sanctioned this
application."

However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I
say, no. Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J.
J. Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the
eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal. Man can
no more give up labor than liberty. Now, to recognize the right of
territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish
the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest
ourselves of manhood.

But I wish that this consent, of which so much is made, had been given,
either tacitly or formally. What would have been the result? Evidently,
the surrenders would have been reciprocal; no right would have been
abandoned without the receipt of an equivalent in exchange. We thus come
back to equality again,--the sine qua non of appropriation; so that,
after having justified property by universal consent, that is, by
equality, we are obliged to justify the inequality of conditions by
property. Never shall we extricate ourselves from this dilemma. Indeed,
if, in the terms of the social compact, property has equality for its
condition, at the moment when equality ceases to exist, the compact is
broken and all property becomes usurpation. We gain nothing, then, by
this pretended consent of mankind.

% 3.--Prescription Gives No Title to Property.

The right of property was the origin of evil on the earth, the first
link in the long chain of crimes and misfortunes which the human race
has endured since its birth. The delusion of prescription is the fatal