Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood.
But I wish that this consent, of which so much is made, had been given, either tacitly or formally.

What would have been the result?
Evidently, the surrenders would have been reciprocal; no right would have been abandoned without the receipt of an equivalent in exchange.

We thus come back to equality again,--the sine qua non of appropriation; so that, after having justified property by universal consent, that is, by equality, we are obliged to justify the inequality of conditions by property.

Never shall we extricate ourselves from this dilemma.

Indeed, if, in the terms of the social compact, property has equality for its condition, at the moment when equality ceases to exist, the compact is broken and all property becomes usurpation.