and who believes that the world will come to an end now that he no longer possesses them, and he will expound similar ideas on property to you.
Question the members of the Capetian dynasty, and they will tell you that the most sacred property is the right of inheritance, that they have the ancient right of oppressing the twenty-five million persons now populating the territory of France, of destroying them, of treating them—legally and monarchically—according to their own royal whim.
Property has no moral principle in the eyes of all these persons. Why does your Declaration of the Rights of Man suffer from the same defect? In your defense of liberty … you have stated—and rightly so—that it is limited by the rights of one's neighbor; why have you not applied the same principle to property, which after all is a social institution? … You have increased the number of articles in order to afford the largest possible latitude to the right to one's property, and yet you have not added a word in limitation of this right, with the result that your Declaration of the Rights of Man might make the impression of having been created not for the poor, but for the rich, the speculators, for the stock exchange jobbers. To remedy these defects, I propose the following additions:
1. Property is that right held by each citizen to dispose freely of that portion of the general goods guaranteed him by the laws.
