What is Property?

government and our institutions, property; I am within my rights: I may be mistaken in the conclusion that will emerge from my researches; I am within my rights: it pleases me to put the final thought of my book at the beginning; I am still within my rights.

One author teaches that property is a civil right, born of occupation and sanctioned by law; another maintains that it is a natural right, having its source in labor: and these doctrines, however opposed they may seem, are encouraged, applauded. I claim that neither labor, nor occupation, nor law, can create property; that it is an effect without a cause: am I reprehensible?

What murmurs arise!

— Property is theft! Here is the tocsin alarm bell of '93! Here is the call to arms of revolutions!...

— Reader, reassure yourself: I am by no means an agent of discord, a firebrand of sedition. I am anticipating history by a few days; I am exposing a truth whose release we are vainly trying to stop; I am writing the preamble of our future constitution. This definition, which seems blasphemous to you, property is theft, would be the iron that wards off lightning, if our preoccupations permitted us to hear it; but how many interests, how many prejudices oppose it!... Philosophy will not change, alas! the course of events; destinies will be fulfilled independently of prophecy: besides, must not justice be done, and our education be completed?

— Property is theft!... What an overturning of human ideas! Proprietor and thief have at all times been contradictory expressions, as much as the beings they designate are antipathetic; all languages have consecrated this antilogy logical contradiction. On what authority, then, could you attack universal consent and contradict the human race? Who are you to deny the reason of peoples and ages?

— What does it matter to you, reader, what my meager individuality is? I am, like you, of a century where reason submits only to fact and proof; my name, as well as yours,