What is Property?

riches, the obsession with pleasure, political agitation; all these data were by you gathered into a single proposition: On the utility of the celebration of Sunday, from the perspectives of hygiene, morality, and family and civic relations.

Under Christian language you asked, gentlemen, what is the true system of society. A competitor (1) dared to maintain and believed he had proven that the institution of a weekly rest is necessarily linked to a political system whose basis is the equality of conditions; that, without equality, this institution is an anomaly, an impossibility; that equality alone can make this ancient and mysterious rest of the seventh day flourish again. This discourse did not obtain your approval, because, without denying the connection noted by the competitor, you judged, and rightly so, gentlemen, that the principle of the equality of conditions not being itself demonstrated, the author's ideas did not emerge from the sphere of hypotheses.

Finally, gentlemen, this fundamental principle of equality, you have just put to competition in the following terms: On the economic and moral consequences that the law on the equal division of goods among children has had until now in France, and that it seems destined to produce there in the future.

Unless one confines oneself to commonplaces without grandeur or scope, this is, it seems to me, how your question must be understood:

If the law has been able to make the right of inheritance common to all children of the same father, can it not make it equal for all his grandchildren and great-grandchildren?

If the law no longer recognizes younger children original: "cadets"; here referring to the historic legal imbalance between heirs in the family, can it not, through the right of inheritance, ensure that there are no more in the race, in the tribe, in the nation?

Can equality, through the right of succession, be preserved among citizens, just as well as among cousins and brothers? In a word, can the principle of succession become a principle of equality?

(1) On the utility of the celebration of Sunday, etc., by P.-J. Proudhon: Besançon, 1839, 12mo; 2nd edition, Paris, 1841, 18mo.