What is Property?

XII

...that you have slightly modified the roughness of form that gave a work of this gravity the allure and appearance of a pamphlet: for you scared me quite a bit, sir, and it took nothing less than your talent to reassure me about your intentions. One does not spend so much genuine knowledge to set fire to one's country. This proposition, so raw, property is theft! was of a nature to turn away from your book even those serious minds who do not judge a sack by its label, if you had persisted in maintaining it in its savage naivety. But if you have softened the form, you remain no less faithful to the substance of your doctrines, and although you did me the honor of making me a party to this perilous preaching, I cannot accept a solidarity that would certainly honor me for the talent, but would compromise me for everything else.

I am in agreement with you on only one thing, which is that there is too often abuse in this world of all types of property. But I do not conclude from the abuse to the abolition, a heroic expedient too similar to death, which cures all ills. I will go further: I will confess to you that of all the abuses, the most odious in my opinion are those of property; but once again, there is a remedy for this evil without violating it, and especially without destroying it. If the current laws regulate its use poorly, we can remake them. Our civil code French legal framework is not the Koran: we have not failed to prove it. Therefore, reshape the laws that regulate the use of property, but be sober with anathemas; for with logic, what honest man would have entirely clean hands? Do you believe that one can be a thief without knowing it, without wanting it, without suspecting it? Do you not admit that current society has in its constitution, like any man, all sorts of virtues and vices derived from our ancestors? Is property then in your eyes a thing so simple and so abstract that you can reshape it and equalize it, if I dare say so, at the rolling mill of metaphysics? You have said, sir, in these two beautiful and paradoxical improvisations, too many excellent practical things to be a pure and inflexible utopian an impractical dreamer. You know...