could not have
been established except by destroying primitive equality, while its two
principal institutions, property and government, are encroachments.

"He who first enclosed a plot of ground, and who took it into his to
say this belongs to me, and who found people simple enough to believe
him,[3338] was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, what
wars, what murders, what misery and what horrors would have been spared
the human race if he who, pulling up the landmark and filling up the
ditch, had cried out to his fellows: Be wary of that impostor; you are
lost if you forget that no one has a right to the land and that its
fruits are the property of all!"--The first ownership was a robbery
by which an individual abstracted from the community a portion of the
public domain. Nothing could justify the outrage, nothing added by him
to the soil, neither his industry, nor his trouble, nor his valor. "In
vain may he assert that he built this wall, and acquired this land by
his labor. Who marked it out for him, one might ask, and how do you come
to be paid for labor which was never imposed on you? Are you not aware
that a multitude of your brethren are suffering and perishing with want
because you have too much, and that the express and unanimous consent
of the whole human species is requisite before appropriating to yourself
more than your share of the common subsistence?"--

Underneath this theory we recognize the personal attitude, the grudge of
the poor embittered commoner, who, on entering society, finds the places
all taken, and who is incapable of creating one for himself; who, in his
confessions, marks the day when he ceased to feel hungry; who, for
lack of something better, lives in concubinage with a serving-woman and
places his five children in an orphanage; who is in turn servant, clerk,
vagabond, teacher and copyist, always on the look-out, using his wits to
maintain his independence, disgusted with the contrast between what he
is outwardly and what he feels himself inwardly, avoiding envy only by
disparagement, and preserving in the folds of his heart an old grudge
"against the rich and the fortunate in this world as if they were so at
his expense, as if their assumed happiness had been an infringement on
his happiness." [3339]--Not only is there injustice in the origin of
property but again there is injustice in the power it secures to itself,
the wrong increasing like a canker under the partiality of