PROPERTY IN THE ALASKAN SEAL HERD. 85 



doos not lend its aid to reinforce the imperfect possession unless the 

 great purposes of human society require it. 



That it will lend its aid to the utmost extent when necessary in order 

 to attain its own great purposes is made manifest by the tendency of 

 the advancing civilization of the present age to award a right of prop- 

 erty in the products of the mind, which are wholly intangible and not 

 the subject of possession in any form, and to extend the right, not only 

 by municipal law throughout the territories of particular states, but 

 beyond their boundaries by the means of an international recognition. 

 This right, fully defended by natural law, and long established in re- 

 spect of useful inventions in the arts, has been for years pressing for 

 recognition in respect to all the products of the mind and throughout 

 the world. Its inherent moral force has secured a certain measure of 

 obedience without the aid which is furnished by judicial tribunals, and 



it to-day, positive laws and magistrates to execute thein were necessary; in other 

 words, the civil state was required. 



"The increase of the human species had rendered agriculture necessary ; the need 

 no assure to the cultivator the fruits of his lahor made felt the necessity of perma- 

 tent property and of laws to protect them. Thus, it is to property that we owe the 

 foundation of the civil state. Without the tie of property it would never have heen 

 possible to subject man to the salutary yoke of the law; and without permanent 

 property the earth would have continued to remain a vast forest. 



" Let us say, therefore, with the most exact writers, that if transient ownership 

 or the right of preference with occupation gives, is anterior to the foundation of 

 civil society, permanent ownership, as we know it to-day, is the work of civil law. 



It is civil law wliich has established as a maxim that once acquired property is 

 never lost without the act of the owner, and that it is preserved even after the 

 owner has lost possession or detention of the thing, and when it is in the hands of 

 a third party. 



Thus property and possession, which in theprimitive state were confounded, be- 

 came by the civil law two distinct and independent things ; two things which, 

 according to the language of the laws, have nothing in common between them. 

 Property is a right, a legal attribute; possession is a fact. 



It is seen by this what prodigious changes have been wrought in property, and 

 how much civil laws have changed its nature. 



Sec. 72. This change was effected by means of real action that the laws granted 

 against the possessor whoever he might be, to compel him to surrender the t'ning 

 to the owner who had lost possession thereof. This action was granted to the owner 

 not alone against the possessor in bad faith, but also against the possessor in good 

 faith, to whom the thing had come without fraud or without violence, without his 

 being cognizant of the owner's rights, and even though he had acquired it from a 

 third party by virtue of a legal title. 



Sec. 73. Property was, therefore, considered a moral quality inherent in the thing, 

 as a real tie which binds it to the owner, and which can not be severed without an 

 act of his. 



This right of reclaiming a thing in whatever hands it is found is that which forms 

 the principal and distinctive characteristic of property in the civil state. (Toullier 

 French Civil Law, Paris, 1842, 5th ed., vol. 3, tit. 2, ch. 1.) 



