imply declared the fact that thereafter none could live
without working. It necessarily followed that, to obtain equality of
products, there must be equality of labor; and that, to obtain equality
of labor, there must be equality of facilities for labor. Whoever
without labor got possession, by force or by strategy, of another's
means of subsistence, destroyed equality, and placed himself above or
outside of the law. Whoever monopolized the means of production on the
ground of greater industry, also destroyed equality. Equality being then
the expression of right, whoever violated it was UNJUST.

Thus, labor gives birth to private possession; the right in a thing--jus
in re. But in what thing? Evidently IN THE PRODUCT, not IN THE SOIL.
So the Arabs have always understood it; and so, according to Caesar and
Tacitus, the Germans formerly held. "The Arabs," says M. de Sismondi,
"who admit a man's property in the flocks which he has raised, do not
refuse the crop to him who planted the seed; but they do not see why
another, his equal, should not have a right to plant in his turn.
The inequality which results from the pretended right of the first
occupant seems to them to be based on no principle of justice; and when
all the land falls into the hands of a certain number of inhabitants,
there results a monopoly in their favor against the rest of the nation,
to which they do not wish to submit."

Well, they have shared the land. I admit that therefrom results a more
powerful organization of labor; and that this method of distribution,
fixed and durable, is advantageous to production: but how could this
division give to each a transferable right of property in a thing
to which all had an inalienable right of possession? In the terms
of jurisprudence, this metamorphosis from possessor to proprietor is
legally impossible; it implies in the jurisdiction of the courts the
union of possessoire and petitoire; and the mutual concessions of those
who share the land are nothing less than traffic in natural rights. The
original cultivators of the land, who were also the original makers of
the law, were not as learned as our legislators, I admit; and had
they been, they could not have done worse: they did not foresee the
consequences of the transformation of the right of private possession
into the right of absolute property. But why have not those, who in
later times have established the distinction between jus in re and jus
ad rem, appl