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In the time of Tiberius, as President Troplong beautifully and officially expressed it, "Democracy at last seated herself on the imperial throne, embodied in the Caesars," those worshipful incarnations of democracy, brought to our view in the tableaux of Suetonius and by the accounts of Tacitus.
Why has not the legislator fixed the conditions differently? why, instead of twenty and thirty years, is not a single year sufficient to prescribe? why are not voluntary absence and confessed idleness as good grounds for dispossession as involuntary absence, ignorance, or apathy? But in vain should we ask M. Troplong, the philosopher, to tell us the ground of prescription.
M. Troplong denies the reality of the right of possession; he denies that possession has ever existed as a principle of society; and he quotes M. de Savigny, who holds precisely the opposite position, and whom he is content to leave unanswered.
If M. Troplong had only known how to think and reflect, before abandoning the original fact of occupancy and plunging into the theory of labor, he would have asked himself: "What is it to occupy?"
And this is what is honored with the name of jurisprudence and philosophy, the restoration of force. And if M. Troplong is my judge, M. Troplong will condemn me!
If it were otherwise, it would have changed its nature; it would be a new form of society, whose statutes would regulate, no longer the profits especially, but the distribution of labor and the conditions of exchange; it would be exactly such an association as M. Troplong denies and as the jurisprudence of monopoly excludes.
His highly colored complexion and well-developed corpulence might have made persons think, in spite of his actual sobriety, that he cultivated Bacchus as well as Troplong and Toullier. His half-extinct voice was the sign of an oppressive asthma. Perhaps the dry air of Montegnac had contributed to fix him there. He lived in a house arranged for him by a well-to-do cobbler to whom it belonged.
I work for the reformation of ideas. Little matters it that they find me dry and austere. I mean to conquer by a bold struggle, or die in the attempt; and whoever shall come to the defence of property, I swear that I will force him to argue like M. Considerant, or philosophize like M. Troplong.
For if by association we are to understand only the forms of partnership fixed by the commercial code, the philosophy of which has been summarized for us by MM. Troplong and Delangle, it is no longer worth while to distinguish between socialists and economists, between one party which seeks association and another which maintains that association exists.
Is there any thing new in this doctrine? The human personality, though it may be the principle or the subject of property, as matter is the object, is not the CONDITION. Now, it is this condition which we most need to know. So far, M. Troplong tells us no more than his masters, and the figures with which he adorns his style add nothing to the old idea.
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