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means by which the fund is to be created.
I have already established the principle, namely, that the earth, in its natural uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race—that in that state, every person would have been born to property—and that the system of landed property, by its inseparable connection with cultivation, and with what is called civilized life, has obsorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.
The fault, however, is not in the present possessors. No complaint is intended, or ought to be alleged against them, unless they adopt the crime by opposing justice. The fault is in the system, and it has stolen imperceptibly upon the world, aided afterwards by the Agrarian law of the sword. But the fault can be made to reform itself by successive generations, without diminishing or deranging the property of any of the present possessors, and yet the operation of the fund can commence, and be in full activity, the first year of its establishment, or soon after, as I shall shew.
It is proposed that the payments, as already stated, be made to every person, rich or poor. It is best to make it so, to prevent invidious distinctions. It is also right it should be so, because it is in lieu of the natural inheritance,
