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Was I wrong in claiming that confusion reigned among legists, and ought I to be legally prosecuted for having said that their science henceforth stood convicted of falsehood, its glory eclipsed? The ordinary resources of the law no longer sufficing, philosophy, political economy, and the framers of systems have been consulted. All the oracles appealed to have been discouraging.
The legists continue to ground their appreciation of every actual political condition on the law of the holy war, which war ought never to be allowed to cease entirely until all mankind is reduced to the authority of Islam the heathen by conversion, the adherents of acknowledged Scripture by submission.
While the Roman law and all the savants inspired by it teach that property in its origin is the right of first occupancy sanctioned by law, the modern legists, dissatisfied with this brutal definition, claim that property is based upon LABOR. Immediately they infer that he who no longer labors, but makes another labor in his stead, loses his right to the earnings of the latter.
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?
Within each nation the laity is inclined to put limits to the power and privileges of the clergy. In several of the countries, monarchy in the modern European form gets a firm foothold. The enfranchisement of the towns, the rise of commerce, the influence gained by the legists and by the Roman law, of which they were the expounders, had betokened the dawn of a new era.
If the higher education, reconstructed according to the views of M. Chevalier, was sought after by all young French men instead of by only ninety thousand as commonly, there would be no exaggeration in raising the estimate of the number of minds mathematically inclined from three thousand five hundred and twenty to ten thousand; but, by the same argument, we should have ten thousand artists, philologists, and philosophers; ten thousand doctors, physicians, chemists, and naturalists; ten thousand economists, legists, and administrators; twenty thousand manufacturers, foremen, merchants, and accountants; forty thousand farmers, wine-growers, miners, etc., in all, one hundred thousand specialists a year, or about one-third of our youth.
They had detached themselves by an irresistible natural effectiveness from the surface of that youthful scholastic world around the episcopal throne of Chartres, carrying its various aptitudes as if to a perfect triple flower; restless Amadee de l'Autrec, who was to be a soldier, dazzled early into dangerous, rebellious paths by the iron ideal of the soldiers of "the religion," and even now fitting his blond prettiness to airs of Huguenot austerity; Camille Pontdormi, who meant to be a lawyer in an age in which certain legists had asserted an audacity of genius after a manner very captivating to youth with any appetite for predominance over its fellows already winsomely starched a little, amid his courtly finery, of garb, and manner, and phrase; Jasmin de Villebon, who hardly knew what he meant to be, except perhaps a poet himself, certainly, a poem for any competent reader.
Originally, the word PROPERTY was synonymous with PROPER or INDIVIDUAL POSSESSION. It designated each individual's special right to the use of a thing. The legists knew this very well, but instead of opposing, as they ought, this accumulation of profits, they accepted and sanctioned the whole.
THE ROMAN LAW. The revised study of the Roman law brought in a code at variance with feudal principles. The middle class, that was growing up in the great commercial cities, availed themselves, as far as they could, of its principles in regard to the inheritance of property. The legists helped in a thousand ways to emancipate them from the yoke of feudal traditions.
If the Roman legists had seen this analogy, they undoubtedly would have hesitated less over the question of expropriation for the sake of public utility. Such, then, is the sanction of the social right of expropriation: indemnity. Now, practically, not only is the principle of indemnity not applied in all cases where it ought to be, but it is impossible that it should be so applied.
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