h immediately
follow from this position?

To show the justice and utility of prescription, M. Troplong supposes
the case of a bona fide possessor whom a proprietor, long since
forgotten or even unknown, is attempting to eject from his possession.
"At the start, the error of the possessor was excusable but not
irreparable. Pursuing its course and growing old by degrees, it has
so completely clothed itself in the colors of truth, it has spoken
so loudly the language of right, it has involved so many confiding
interests, that it fairly may be asked whether it would not cause
greater confusion to go back to the reality than to sanction the
fictions which it (an error, without doubt) has sown on its way? Well,
yes; it must be confessed, without hesitation, that the remedy would
prove worse than the disease, and that its application would lead to the
most outrageous injustice."

How long since utility became a principle of law? When the Athenians, by
the advice of Aristides, rejected a proposition eminently advantageous
to their republic, but also utterly unjust, they showed finer moral
perception and greater clearness of intellect than M. Troplong. Property
is an eternal right, independent of time, indestructible except by the
act and at the will of the proprietor; and here this right is taken from
the proprietor, and on what ground? Good God! on the ground of ABSENCE!
Is it not true that legists are governed by caprice in giving and taking
away rights? When it pleases these gentlemen, idleness, unworthiness, or
absence can invalidate a right which, under quite similar circumstances,
labor, residence, and virtue are inadequate to obtain. Do not be
astonished that legists reject the absolute. Their good pleasure is law,
and their disordered imaginations are the real cause of the EVOLUTIONS
in jurisprudence.

"If the nominal proprietor should plead ignorance, his claim would be
none the more valid. Indeed, his ignorance might arise from inexcusable
carelessness, etc."

What! in order to legitimate dispossession through prescription, you
suppose faults in the proprietor! You blame his absence,--which may
have been involuntary; his neglect,--not knowing what caused it; his
carelessness,--a gratuitous supposition of your own! It is absurd. One
very simple observation suffices to annihilate this theory. Society,
which, they tell us, makes an exception in the interest of order in
favor of the possessor as against the old pro