The political liberals are anxious that, if possible, all servitudes be dissolved, and every one be free lord on his ground, even if this ground has only so much area as can have its requirements adequately filled by the manure of one person. (The farmer in the story married even in his old age "that he might profit by his wife's dung.") Be it ever so little, if one only has somewhat of his own,--to wit, a _respected_ property! The more such owners, such cotters,[178] the more "free people and good patriots" has the State. Political liberalism, like everything religious, counts on _respect_, humaneness, the virtues of love. Therefore does it live in incessant vexation. For in practice people respect nothing, and every day the small possessions are bought up again by greater proprietors, and the "free people" change into day-laborers. If, on the contrary, the "small proprietors" had reflected that the great property was also theirs, they would not have respectfully shut themselves out from it, and would not have been shut out. Property as the civic liberals understand it deserves the attacks of the Communists and Proudhon: it is untenable, because the civic proprietor is in truth nothing but a propertyless man, one who is everywhere _shut out_. Instead of owning the world, as he might, he does not own even the paltry point on which he turns around. Proudhon wants not the _propriétaire_ but the _possesseur_ or _usufruitier_.[179] What does that mean? He wants no one to own the land; but the benefit of it--even though one were allowed only the hundredth part of this benefit, this fruit--is at any rate one's property, which he can dispose of at will. He who has only the benefit of a field is assuredly not the proprietor of it; still less he who, as Proudhon would have it, must give up so much of this benefit as is not required for his wants; but he is the proprietor of the share that is left him. Proudhon, therefore, denies only such and such property, not _property_ itself. If we want no longer to leave the land to the landed proprietors, but to appropriate it to _ourselves_, we unite ourselves to this end, form a union, a _société_, that makes _itself_ proprietor; if we have good luck in this, then those persons cease to be landed proprietors. And, as from the land, so we can drive them out of many another property yet, in order to make it _our_ property, the property of the--_conquerors_. The conquerors form a society which one may imagine so great that it by degrees embraces all humanity; but so-called humanity too is as such only a thought (spook); the individuals are its reality. And these individuals as a collective mass will treat land and earth not less arbitrarily than an isolated individual or so-called _propriétaire_. Even so, therefore, _property_ remains standing, and that as "exclusive" too, in that _humanity_, this great society, excludes the _individual_ from its property (perhaps only leases to him,