All men have a right—and the same right—to happiness.
Happiness is the enjoyment (without any limit but that prescribed by the want and the faculty of enjoying) of all the good things existing or possible in this world; whether natural and primitive, or progressively created by the intelligence and the labour of man.
Certain men, certain families, or certain classes have acquired the exclusive enjoyment of some (indeed the greater part) of the most essential and productive of these good things; or, in other words, these things, or the means of procuring them, are become the special and perpetual property of certain men, families, and classes.
Such a confiscation of a part of the fund common to mankind, for the advantage of a few, is essentially contrary to justice; contrary to the rights of the men of the same generation, who ought all to enjoy it equally; and contrary to the rights of successive generations, each of which, on its entrance into life, ought to find the good things of life equally accessible, and to enjoy them in its turn like its predecessors.
Therefore all special and perpetual appropriation of the good things which confer happiness, and of the means of procuring those good things, must be abolished, in order to insure the universal enjoyment and the equal distribution of them amongst all men, and all successive generations of men.
But how is it possible to abolish property? or, at least, so to transform it, that, as regards its social and permanent effects, it may be as if it were abolished?
Here the leaders of the Social Republic differ greatly among themselves. Some recommend slow and gentle measures; others urge prompt and decisive ones. Some have recourse to political means—for example, a certain organization of existence and labour in common; others try to invent economical and financial expedients—for example, a series of measures designed gradually to destroy the net revenue of property, whether in land or capital, and thus to render property itself useless and illusory. But all these schemes originate in the same design and tend to the same result; the abolition or the nullification of personal, domestic, and hereditary property; and of all institutions, social or political, which are based upon personal, domestic, and hereditary property.
Such, through all the diversity, obscurity, ambiguity, and contradiction of the ideas which circulate among the adherents of the Social Republic, is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega, of all these systems; such is the end they pursue, and hope to attain.
But the following truths are forgotten by M. Proudhon and his friends.
Mankind is not merely a series of individuals called men; it is a race, which has a common life, and a general and progressive destiny. This is the distinctive character of man, which he alone of created beings possesses.