Where is, I do not say the consistency, but, the honesty of this law?
Prescription is a result of the civil law, a creation of the legislator. Why has not the legislator fixed the conditions differently?—why, instead of twenty and thirty years, is not a single year sufficient to prescribe?—why are not voluntary absence and confessed idleness as good grounds for dispossession as involuntary absence, ignorance, or apathy?
But in vain should we ask M. Troplong, the philosopher, to tell us the ground of prescription. Concerning the code, M. Troplong does not reason. “The interpreter,” he says, “must take things as they are, society as it exists, laws as they are made: that is the only sensible starting-point.” Well, then, write no more books; cease to reproach your predecessors — who, like you, have aimed only at interpretation of the law—for having remained in the rear; talk no more of philosophy and progress, for the lie sticks in your throat.
M. Troplong denies the reality of the right of possession; he denies that possession has ever existed as a principle of society; and he quotes M. de Savigny, who holds precisely the opposite position, and whom he is content to leave unanswered. At one time, M. Troplong asserts that possession and property are contemporaneous, and that they exist at the same time, which implies that the right of property is based on the fact of possession,—a conclusion which is evidently absurd; at another, he denies that possession had any historical existence prior to property,—an assertion which is contradicted by the customs of many nations which cultivate the land without appropriating it; by the Roman law, which distinguished so clearly between possession and property; and by our code itself, which makes possession for twenty or thirty years the condition of property. Finally, M. Troplong
