"Men steal: first, by violence on the highway; second, alone or in a band; third, by burglary; fourth, by embezzlement; fifth, by fraudulent bankruptcy; sixth, by forgery; seventh, by counterfeiting. Eighth, by pocket-picking; ninth, by swindling; tenth, by breach of trust; eleventh, by gambling and lotteries.--Twelfth, by usury. Thirteenth, by rent-taking.--Fourteenth, by commerce, when the profits are more than fair wages for the trader's work.--Fifteenth, by selling one's own product at a profit, and by accepting a sinecure or a fat salary."[163] "In theft such as the laws forbid, force and fraud are employed alone and openly; in authorized theft they are disguised under a produced utility, which they use as a device for plundering their victim. The direct use of violence and force was early and unanimously rejected; no nation has yet reached the point of delivering itself from theft when united with talent, labor, and possession."[164] In this sense property is "theft,"[165] "the exploitation of the weak by the strong,"[166] "contrary to right,"[167] "the suicide of society."[168] II. _Justice demands, in place of property, a distribution of goods based on the legal norm that contracts must be lived up to._ Proudhon calls that portion of goods which is assigned to the individual by contract, "property." In 1840 he had demanded that individual possession be substituted for property; with this one change evil would disappear from the earth.[169] But in 1841 he is already explaining that by property he means only its abuses;[170] nay, he even then describes as necessary the creation of an immediately applicable social system in which the rights of barter and sale, of direct and collateral inheritance, of primogeniture and bequest, should find their place.[171] In 1846 he says, "Some day transformed property will be an idea positive, complete, social, and true; a property which will abolish the old property and will become equally effective and beneficent for all."[172] In 1848 he is declaring that "property, as to its principle or substance, which is human personality, must never perish; it must remain in man's heart as a perpetual stimulus to labor, as the antagonist whose absence would cause labor to fall into idleness and death."[173] And in 1850 he announces: "What I sought for as far back as 1840, in defining property, what I am wanting now, is not a destruction; I have said it till I am tired. That would have been to fall with Rousseau, Plato, Louis Blanc himself, and all the adversaries of property, into _Communism_, against which I protest with all my might; what I ask for property is a BALANCE,"[174]--that is, "justice."[175]