Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/270

256 prepared shelter or natural hiding-place. The food and the nest or den which it has found or made for itself, is considered by the animal as its property. It feels that these things belong to it, and to no other being, and will not submit without resistance to being deprived of them by any other individual. A life that makes foresight and provision for the future a necessity, leads to the extension of this sentiment of proprietorship and to the development of the impulse for acquiring increased individual possessions. A beast of prey, which lives upon fresh meat, fixes the limits of his proprietorship in the total amount of fresh meat existing, at the quantity which he requires for one single meal. But an animal which lives upon a vegetable diet, if his home is in a region where there is a winter with a cessation of vegetation, helps himself from the common store-house of nature to far more than is necessary to supply his immediate wants. He accumulates more food than he can possibly require during the coming months, thus decreasing without any organic necessity, the amount of food at the disposal of other animals, he becomes a capitalist and an unscrupulous egotist. In this way squirrels, field mice, marmots, etc., heap up quantities of nuts and fruits of all kinds in their holes to provide for the coming winter, which is not all consumed at the return of spring, when they can find food again in the fields and forests. They not only realize the possibility of their personal proprietorship but they accumulate wealth, they become rich, in the sense of owning more than they require for their actual wants. Man belongs in the category of animals to whom provision for the future is necessary. The acquisition of individual property, to increase it beyond what is actually required for the moment, to defend it against the encroachments of others, these are natural vital actions and instincts in him