question, "What is property?" was, even in his first work, not
"property is theft" but "property is liberty;" only the use of all his
great scientific apparatus was quite superfluous, because it was in no
way connected with the chief purpose of his book. Proudhon might just
as well have placed the supposed conclusion, the Ten Commandments of
his economic doctrine, at the beginning of his book, for they were
arrived at not by the method of science but of speculation. These Ten
Commandments run:

(1) Individual possession is the fundamental condition of social life;
five thousand years of the history of property prove it; property is
the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against all
right; suppress property and maintain possession, and you would by
this one main alteration transform everything--laws, government,
economy, statesmanship; you would make evil disappear from the earth.

(2) Since the right of occupation is the same for all, possession
changes according to the number of possessors; thus property can no
longer be created.

(3) Since the result of labour remains the same for the whole of the
community, property, which arising from the exploitation of others and
from rent, disappears.

(4) Since every human work necessarily arises from a collective force,
every piece of property becomes both collective and indivisible--to be
exact, labour annihilates property.

(5) Since every capacity for any occupation, including all the
instruments of labour and capital, is collective property, the
inequality of treatment and of goods, which rests upon the inequality
of capabilities, is injustice and theft.

(6) Trade necessarily presupposes the freedom of the contracting
parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged; but since value
is determined by the amount of time and expense which each product
costs, and since freedom is inviolable, the workers remain necessarily
equal in reward as also in rights and duties.

(7) Products are only exchanged again for products; but since every
bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and
unjust. Take heed to this, the first and the most elementary principle
of economics, and pauperism, luxury, servitude, vice, crime, and
hunger will disappear from our midst.

(8) Men are already, before they fully agreed to do so, associated
from the physical and mathematical law of production; the equality of
external conditions of existen