a fiction of the law, conventionally adopted.

But all property necessarily originated in prescription, or, as the
Latins say, in _usucapion;_ that is, in continued possession.

I ask, then, in the first place, how possession can become property by
the lapse of time? Continue possession as long as you wish, continue
it for years and for centuries, you never can give duration--which of
itself creates nothing, changes nothing, modifies nothing--the power
to change the usufructuary into a proprietor. Let the civil law secure
against chance-comers the honest possessor who has held his position
for many years,--that only confirms a right already respected; and
prescription, applied in this way, simply means that possession which
has continued for twenty, thirty, or a hundred years shall be retained
by the occupant. But when the law declares that the lapse of time
changes possessor into proprietor, it supposes that a right can be
created without a producing cause; it unwarrantably alters the character
of the subject; it legislates on a matter not open to legislation; it
exceeds its own powers. Public order and private security ask only
that possession shall be protected. Why has the law created property?
Prescription was simply security for the future; why has the law made it
a matter of privilege?

Thus the origin of prescription is identical with that of property
itself; and since the latter can legitimate itself only when accompanied
by equality, prescription is but another of the thousand forms which the
necessity of maintaining this precious equality has taken. And this is
no vain induction, no far-fetched inference. The proof is written in all
the codes.

And, indeed, if all nations, through their instinct of justice and their
conservative nature, have recognized the utility and the necessity
of prescription; and if their design has been to guard thereby the
interests of the possessor,--could they not do something for the absent
citizen, separated from his family and his country by commerce, war, or
captivity, and in no position to exercise his right of possession? No.
Also, at the same time that prescription was introduced into the laws,
it was admitted that property is preserved by intent alone,--_nudo
animo_. Now, if property is preserved by intent alone, if it can be
lost only by the action of the proprietor, what can be the use of
prescription? How does the law dare to presume that the proprietor, who
preserve