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How should the mere avowal of my will to exclude others from the use of a thing at once give me a right to it? Clearly such an avowal itself requires a foundation of right, instead of being one. All true, i.e., moral, right of property is based simply and solely on work, as was pretty generally assumed before Kant, and is distinctly and beautifully expressed in the oldest of all codes of law: “Wise men who know the past explain that a cultured field is the property of him who cut down the wood and cleared and ploughed it, as an antelope belongs to the first hunter who mortally wounds it”.
