f the services which he had
just rendered to his country; his estate ought to be restored to him. It
became, therefore, customary to retain property by intent alone--_nudo
animo;_ it could be sacrificed only with the consent and by the action
of the proprietor.

It was necessary that the equality in the division should be kept up
from one generation to another, without a new distribution of the land
upon the death of each family; it appeared therefore natural and just
that children and parents, according to the degree of relationship
which they bore to the deceased, should be the heirs of their ancestors.
Thence came, in the first place, the feudal and patriarchal custom of
recognizing only one heir; then, by a quite contrary application of the
principle of equality, the admission of all the children to a share in
their father's estate, and, very recently also among us, the definitive
abolition of the right of primogeniture.

But what is there in common between these rude outlines of instinctive
organization and the true social science? How could these men, who never
had the faintest idea of statistics, valuation, or political economy,
furnish us with principles of legislation?

"The law," says a modern writer on jurisprudence, "is the expression of
a social want, the declaration of a fact: the legislator does not make
it, he declares it. 'This definition is not exact. The law is a method
by which social wants must be satisfied; the people do not vote it, the
legislator does not express it: the savant discovers and formulates it."
But in fact, the law, according to M. Ch. Comte, who has devoted half a
volume to its definition, was in the beginning only the EXPRESSION OF
A WANT, and the indication of the means of supplying it; and up to this
time it has been nothing else. The legists--with mechanical fidelity,
full of obstinacy, enemies of philosophy, buried in literalities--have
always mistaken for the last word of science that which was only the
inconsiderate aspiration of men who, to be sure, were well-meaning, but
wanting in foresight.

They did not foresee, these old founders of the domain of property, that
the perpetual and absolute right to retain one's estate,--a right which
seemed to them equitable, because it was common,--involves the right to
transfer, sell, give, gain, and lose it; that it tends, consequently,
to nothing less than the destruction of that equality which they
established it to maintain. And