He starts from the position that all men have equally the right to property. Not merely in the sense, which is commonly acknowledged, that they have the right to property if they have the opportunity of acquiring it; but in the further significance, that they have a right to the opportunity. They are in fact born proprietors--_de jure_ at least, and they are so for two reasons. First, God has made them persons, and not things, and they have, therefore, all equally a natural right to their amplest personal development. If society interferes with this liberty of personal development--if it suffers any of its members to become the slaves of others, for example--it robs them of original rights which belong to them by the mere fact of their manhood. But, secondly, property, resources of some sort, being indispensable means of personal development, God, who has imposed the end, has supplied the means. He has given nature, the earth and the lower creation, into the dominion of man, not of this or that man, or class of men, but of mankind, and consequently every man has, equally with every other, a right to participate in the dominion of nature, a right to use its bounty to the extent required for his personal development. No appropriation of nature can be just which excludes this possibility and robs any man of this natural right. It is, therefore, wrong to allow to any single person, or to any limited number of persons, an absolute dominion over natural resources in which everybody else has, by nature, a right to some extent to share. He who should have complete and exclusive lordship over all nature, would be lord and master of all his fellow-men, and in a period after natural agents are all appropriated the system of complete and absolute property leaves the new-comers at the mercy of those who are already in possession. They can only work if the latter give them the productive instruments; they can only reap from their work so much of its fruits as the latter are pleased to leave with them; and they must perish altogether unless the latter employ them. They are slaves, they are beggars; and yet they came into the world with the rights of a proprietor, of which they can never be divested. Nature laid covers for them as well as for the rest, and a system of property is essentially unjust which ousts them from their seat at her table. The common theory of property starts from the premiss, that all men have the right to property, and draws the conclusion, that, therefore, some men have the right to monopolize it. As usually understood, the proprietary right is as much a right of robbery as a right of property, and Proudhon would have been quite correct in describing property as theft, if no better system of property could be devised than the present.