O logic! O justice! O the marvellous wisdom of economists! The proprietor, if they are right, is like Perrin-Dandin who, when summoned by two travellers to settle a dispute about an oyster, opened it, gobbled it, and said to them:-- "The Court awards you each a shell." Could any thing worse be said of property?
Will Say tell us why the same farmers, who, if there were no proprietors, would contend with each other for possession of the soil, do not contend to-day with the proprietors for this possession?
Obviously, because they think them legitimate possessors, and because their respect for even an imaginary right exceeds their avarice.

I proved, in Chapter II., that possession is sufficient, without property, to maintain social order.

Would it be more difficult, then, to reconcile possessors without masters than tenants controlled by proprietors?
Would laboring men, who respect--much to their own detriment--the pretended rights of the idler, violate the natural rights of the producer and the manufacturer?
What! if the husbandman forfeited his right to the land as soon as he ceased to occupy it, would he become more covetous?
And would the impossibility of demanding increase, of taxing another's labor, be a source of quarrels and law-suits?
The economists use singular logic.
But we are not yet through.

Admit that the proprietor is the legitimate master of the land.
"The land is an instrument of production," they say.

That is true.