Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/271

Rh to which he is impelled by the fundamental impulse of self-preservation, and which are impossible to eradicate. Even under the most violent compulsion of laws framed in opposition to them, they would assert themselves again and again with their elementary strength.

But if individual proprietorship is a natural instinct, and hence utterly refuses to be suppressed, there is one application of the right of personal possession against which reason absolutely revolts, and for whose existence no natural causes can be produced—this is inheritance. It is true that the impulse for the preservation of the species impels all living beings to care for their offspring and to provide the most favorable conditions of existence possible for them. But this care never extends beyond the moment when the young creatures are sufficiently developed to care for themselves without outside assistance, as the parents did before them. There is only sufficient stored up food in the seed of the plant or in the white of the egg, to supply the embryo with nourishment during its earliest stage of life—the time of absolute helplessness. The animals give milk to their young only as long as they are unable to graze or hunt food for themselves, and the parent birds cease to bring worms to their little ones as soon as they have successfully accomplished their first independent flight.

Man alone wishes to provide his descendants with their stored up food, their albumen, their milk and their worms, to the third and fourth, to untold generations. Man alone is anxious to keep his children and great grand-children, into the most distant future, in the embryonic condition in which the young of all animals are provided for by the beings to whom they owe their existence; he will not abandon them to their own resources. When a man accumulates a fortune, he wishes to