Du territoire propre à chaque nation.

CHAP. 7: On the territory proper to each nation.

WHEN we speak of the various objects over which we can extend our observations or exercise our power, in opposition to beings of our species, we designate them by the general name of things; and when we speak of men in opposition to the various objects in the midst of which nature has placed them, we designate them by the name of persons.

If, instead of considering the objects that surround us, in opposition to the individuals who belong to the human race, we consider them in the relations they have with the men, or the aggregations of men whose needs they must particularly satisfy, we designate them by the name of properties; we designate men by the name of proprietors, when we consider them relative to the things of which they can exclusively and legitimately dispose to satisfy their needs [^14].

The word things has a much more extensive sense than the word properties, for it embraces a multitude of objects that have never been appropriated, or which can satisfy no need. Every thing is therefore not a property; but every property is generally a thing. We have to occupy ourselves with things only insofar as they are or become properties.

One can classify properties in two ways, according to whether one considers them in their nature, and abstracting from the men whose needs they must satisfy, or according to whether one considers them in the relations they have with the men to whom they belong, and abstracting from their nature. When one considers them in their nature, one finds a multitude of different species; but one needs to classify them into genera or species only insofar as the differences that distinguish them must influence the whole of legislation. When one considers them relative to the men whose needs they must satisfy and whose existence they must ensure, the most natural division is that which corresponds to the various fractions into which the human race is naturally divided.

After the things to which the jurists have given the name of common, and which are in a way the patrimony of the human race, the highest property by its extent and its importance, is the territory that belongs to each nation. It is in this property that are enclosed the properties of the provinces, the communes, the cities, the families, the individuals. If the first were not admitted, it would be very difficult to recognize the existence of the others, and these latter would be very poorly defended, if the former were not effectively protected. One can well conceive that individual, communal, or provincial properties are not always respected, even when the national territory is sheltered from external aggressions; one could not equally conceive that they would not be violated, if the national territory were not sheltered from invasions. We must therefore begin by determining what constitutes the territory and the properties of a nation: we will then see how the others are formed.

Violence has at all times exercised such an extensive influence on the destiny of nations that, if one were to recognize as legitimate the order of things established by it, one would have to renounce every principle of justice, and substitute for the study of the laws of our nature, the study of cunning and of force. The treaties that consecrate the results that violence has produced do not change their nature, and do not render them morally obligatory. Prudence may advise submitting to them, so long as the danger of violating them is greater than the evils that result from submission; but one may legitimately withdraw from them, the day one can break them with impunity. Diplomatic treaties, like all conventions, are truly obligatory only insofar as they are sanctioned by the laws to which peoples, like individuals, are submitted by their nature. If, instead of being the expression of what is just in itself, they are but a violation of justice, no one is bound to conform to them if he has the strength to withdraw from them. In this respect, a nation is in the same position as an enslaved family: it has duties to fulfill toward itself, toward each of the members of which it is composed, before having any to fulfill toward those who have subjugated it.

It is good, no doubt, to study the state of nations which violence has caused to experience divisions or unions against nature, just as it is good to observe the causes and effects of slavery. The knowledge one acquires by such a study can give us the means to trace in a more precise manner the limits that nature herself assigns to each nation. But one must never lose sight of the fact that the treaties that determine the territory of each people, and which divide the human race into great fractions, have value only insofar as they are in conformity with the nature of things, and that all rights are equally respected. It is with diplomatic conventions, one must never forget, as with all human conventions: they are respectable only when they are the expression of justice and of truth [^15].

It is not impossible that a union or a separation of peoples, which was at first effected only by violence, may end by being maintained by the free consent of all parties. A long submission to the same power, the mixing of families and interests, a community of sentiments, ideas, language, laws, and the habit of trading together, can merge, in a way, into a single nation populations that once formed as many separate peoples. It is thus that this multitude of independent tribes which, in the time of Caesar, covered Gaul, and which were successively subjugated by the Romans and by the Franks, ended by forming a great nation that is called France. But, although submitted to the same laws and the same government, although designated by a single denomination, and united by certain general interests, several have preserved particular interests, a distinct idiom. The differences that the nature of things had produced have resisted to this day the numerous and powerful causes that tended to make them disappear.

Without dwelling on the artificial divisions or unions produced by the ambition or the calculations of governments, we must observe how the human race is naturally divided into several fractions; how each of these fractions, whatever the name by which it is designated, has a territory that is proper to it, and what are the natural limits of this territory. We will then see how these various fractions unite or confederate among themselves, either for their common defense, or for the management of their general interests. We will finally observe the effects that result from the unions or separations against nature, effected by violence.

It will be seen further on that nothing is easier than to observe how most private properties are formed; but it is not equally easy to observe how nations have acquired the territory proper to each of them: the facts in this regard have preceded historical monuments. History has indeed preserved for us the memory of several memorable usurpations; it often shows us conquering armies despoiling vanquished peoples of a part of their possessions; but it never shows us inoffensive peoples taking possession of an unoccupied territory. Although the human race is not, it is said, very ancient, men have always been seen wherever men have been able to live; and wherever men have been found, it has been seen that they considered as their property the land that furnished them with means of existence.

We know of no part of Europe that was completely unoccupied at any period. When the Romans spread there in all directions, they had ceaseless battles to fight: nowhere did they find a corner of land that did not have a proprietor. They could not form establishments outside of their country without despoiling some people of a part of the territory of which none other than it believed it had the property. Their historians, at least, cite no example of it.

In Asia, men are found in all the places where it is possible to take fish or game, to graze flocks, or to cultivate the land. From Kamchatka to the Sunda Islands, and from the banks of the Lena to the seas of China, no land is known which, in one season or another, is not traversed by men who seek means of existence there. Each nation or each tribe has its particular territory, which it cannot go beyond without exposing itself to war; each is in possession of the soil that nourishes it, since a time whose beginning no one could assign.

Africa presents the same phenomenon; there is no known place, capable of offering men means of existence, however meager they may be besides, that is not considered the property of a tribe that inhabits or traverses it since a time whose origin is unknown.

America, although covered with immense forests at the moment it was discovered, was occupied by a multitude of tribes. Each of them had its particular territory, and this territory was limited almost with the same precision as that of the most civilized states. The vast plains of the southern part were inhabited by pastoral peoples, like the center of Asia, as soon as the animals that form a part of their riches were introduced into that country.

Finally, the innumerable islands of the great Ocean, which are designated today by the name of Oceania or Polynesia, and which are considered as a fifth part of our globe, were inhabited at the moment they were discovered; only one appeared deserted to the travelers who observed it; but it was unapproachable and deprived of fresh water.

The occupation of all parts of our globe is therefore a fact that historians and travelers have ascertained, but that no one has ever explained in a satisfactory manner. Conjectures have indeed been made about the emigration and the filiation of some peoples; but these conjectures, always very vague, explain nothing relative to the primitive and successive occupation of the various parts of the earth.

The men who have been encountered in the most barbarous countries did not live in isolation like beasts of prey; everywhere the permanent union of the sexes for the education of children has been observed. This phenomenon, produced by causes inherent in our nature, as I will show elsewhere, has suffered no exception anywhere. It will even be seen further on that the permanent association of man and woman, for the preservation of their species, is even more necessary, if possible, in the state of barbarism than in the state of civilization. The family has therefore been, in all times and in all countries, the first and most natural of associations.

There have been found in Europe, it is true, two children who lived isolated in the forests, and who had taken on some of the habits of wild beasts: one was taken in Hanover, the other in the department of Aveyron.

These two individuals, on whom Montesquieu and Rousseau have built systems, were veritable idiots whom their parents had probably abandoned in the impossibility of making any use of them; when they were observed up close, and for long enough to judge them well, the marvelous completely disappeared [^16].

Not only has it been observed that everywhere the individuals of which the human race is composed were grouped into families, but it has been seen that, in all countries, the families grouped themselves near one another. The travelers who have visited the most savage, most sterile countries, those in which it is most difficult for man to procure means of existence, have never discovered a family living in complete isolation. The least numerous hordes that have been encountered in the most arid countries, such as Australasia and Tierra del Fuego, were composed of at least four or five families.

The hordes that are reduced to living from the products of fishing, hunting, or the milk of their flocks, do not permit themselves to traverse all the countries in which they could find pastures, fish, or game. Each of them has, as has just been seen, its forests, its lakes, its rivers; each of them is circumscribed in a space that it considers its property, and from which it knows it cannot leave with impunity. The countries that seem the least susceptible of appropriation, such as the deserts of the center of Asia and of Arabia, are nevertheless appropriated. They are divided among various hordes of shepherds, each of which successively traverses the part that nature seems to have assigned to it [^17].

Violations of territory produce among savages and among barbarous peoples, wars much more violent than those that are produced by the same cause among civilized nations. Each of them shows himself all the more jealous of having the soil that saw him born and that makes him live respected, as, whatever the extent of his possessions, he is always besieged by misery. To violate the territory of a horde of savages or of shepherds to take fish or game there, or to graze flocks there, is not only to do it injury, it is to attack its means of existence, it is to prepare its destruction [^18].

The frequent wars that violations of territory bring about among barbarous peoples end in treaties, like the wars of civilized nations; by these treaties, the limits of each territory are determined, recognized. A horde of savages sells a part of the lands it occupies, as we sell the things that belong to us; and when the sale is made and the price paid, it no longer lays any claim to them [^19].

If therefore we consider, from a general point of view, the aspect under which the human race presents itself, we see that, since the most remote times, all the parts of the earth that can furnish men with means of existence are occupied by nations more or less civilized, or by hordes more or less barbarous; that at all degrees of civilization or of barbarism, the individuals of which the human race is composed are united in families; that the families group themselves near one another, to form hordes or tribes; that each nation, or each tribe, is enclosed in a space limited on all sides, and that it considers as its property the territory in which it is enclosed.

We must remark that the more a nation develops by the multiplication of the individuals of which it is composed, by the enlightenment and the riches it acquires, the more the territory it occupies becomes for it an incontestable and uncontested property. One has been able to dispute with savage hordes a part of the territory they occupied, because one did not see clearly how they had been formed by means of this territory. One would not contest with a civilized nation the lands on which it has developed, and from which it draws its means of existence: one would take for a madman, he who would claim that the territory of Great Britain belongs to a people other than the one who possesses it. To contest with a nation the territory on which it was formed is in reality to contest its life, for the reason that one could not expel it from it without almost entirely destroying it.When one considers the possessor of a vast domain, relative to other persons of the same nation, one may well claim that he has usurped from them the lands he possesses; but it never happens that one considers him a usurper relative to foreigners. Thus, the ancestors of the English lords, those of the great landowners of Ireland, may be accused of usurpation relative to the inhabitants of those countries, who have no property. No one would take it into his head to say that they were usurpers relative to the French peasants, to the serfs of Poland or of Russia. The reason for this is that a people never contests another's property in its territory, unless it has resolved to exterminate it.

The most extreme egalitarians, those who would have wished all fortunes to be equal, and who have attempted to introduce the community of labors and of goods in various countries, have never demanded equality except among the members of the same nation or the same society. They have not claimed their share of the goods they saw among other peoples, and of which they themselves were deprived; they have not called upon even the poorest persons they have seen outside of their societies to take part in their riches. However, when one believes that it is just that all the members of a nation have an equal share in the distribution of goods and evils, it is difficult to see why equality should not reign between peoples as between the members of a nation; why certain peoples should eternally enjoy a fertile soil and a happy climate, while others should be eternally relegated under a harsh sky, or on an ungrateful soil. Would it not be necessary, to establish equality between nations, as one wishes to establish it between individuals, that each of them should have alternately the enjoyment of a good and a bad territory? What have the inhabitants of Italy done to be better treated by nature than the inhabitants of Norway? How can justice tolerate the inequality of partition that exists between the ones and the others?

There are people who find it contrary to the laws of our nature that a son should inherit from his father; they would wish that lands and even movable properties be transmitted to the State, which would entrust their exploitation to the most capable; in their eyes, the hereditary transmission of the father's goods to his children is an exorbitant privilege that nothing can justify. One sees well here again that property is not recognized, when one compares one family to another family of the same nation; but it is completely so when one compares one people to another people. In the system that tends to distribute fortunes according to the capacity of each, it will not be the sons who succeed their fathers; but one generation will always succeed the other, in the same nation; it will be Englishmen who will always succeed Englishmen, Frenchmen who will succeed Frenchmen. However, if one admitted no property, if the lands, which are called instruments of labor, were always to pass into the hands of the most capable of making them productive, why should not a generation of Englishmen succeed a generation of Russians?

The men who form the most bizarre systems, those who do not admit the existence of private property; those who imagine that it is in the power of men to distribute equally, among the members of the same community, the goods and evils that nature has reserved for us; those, finally, who flatter themselves that they can distribute these goods and these evils among the persons of whom a nation is composed, in such a way that each is treated according to his merit, cannot, therefore, contest either the separation that nature has placed between peoples, nor the property of the territory that each of them possesses exclusively.

In saying that each people has a territory that is proper to it, I do not mean to say that this property, to which we give the name of national, has never been violated. Nothing is more common, on the contrary, than to see, whether in ancient history or in modern history, nations that have destroyed or enslaved other nations to take possession of their territory. The Romans grew only by usurpations of this nature; and most of the colonies that the moderns have established in America or in other countries have been founded only on the ruin of the populations whose place they have taken. Attacks of this kind, which become rarer day by day, prove nothing against the existence of the phenomenon we have just observed. Every day the magistrates have to punish infringements upon private properties; these infringements are not proof that property does not exist or that it is not recognized; the only consequence that can be drawn from them is that it is impossible to prevent every kind of disorder, even in the best-ordered societies.

It is rare that a nation which invades the territory of another despoils it completely, unless it resolves to destroy it. In general, the conquerors take possession of the best lands, and have them cultivated by the vanquished, who deliver the fruits of them to them. It is thus that the Romans made themselves masters of a part of Europe, and that they were then replaced by Barbarians come from the North; it is equally thus that the Tartars established themselves in China. But, sooner or later the force of things restores power to the vanquished population, and makes the race of the victors disappear. What has become, among us, of the descendants of the Franks who invaded Gaul in the fifth century? One would scarcely find two or three families whose plebeian origin is not demonstrated. The number of families who are descended from the Roman conquerors is perhaps not much more considerable.

In our time, invasions still take place; but it is not peoples who despoil others, as in the time of the Roman republic, or in the time of the invasions of the Barbarians; it is kings who, by means of their armies, extend their domination and increase the number of their subjects, that is to say, of their tributaries; such was the domination of the Turks over the Greeks, and such is still the domination of Austria over a part of Italy, of Russia over Poland. Attacks of this kind will become more and more rare; the peoples who enjoy their independence and their liberty will end by understanding that these are crimes that they cannot allow to be consummated with impunity, without compromising their own existence.

Having established as an incontestable fact, recognized by the universality of men, that each people, considered en masse, has a territory that it possesses exclusively, and which forms its property; having demonstrated that this fact is not only recognized, but that it is generally indestructible, since, with the exception of a few poor savages, it is impossible to despoil a nation of its territory, various questions present themselves for resolution: one may ask what are the foundation and the guarantee of this property, what are its natural limits, what is the manner of enjoying it, and how the other kinds of property are formed in its midst. I will answer the first of these questions in a few words; the others will be examined in the following chapters.

Some writers have attributed, without much reason, the origin of private properties to the civil laws, that is to say, to the acts of governments. One cannot, with any appearance of reason, give the same origin to the properties of the various nations. There is no government that has distributed the surface of the earth to the peoples who possess it, and that guarantees to each the part of which it is in possession. It would be difficult to say why some possess a fertile territory, placed under a beautiful climate, while others are relegated to arid lands and under a rigorous sky.

But, if it is impossible to account for the distribution of peoples on the surface of the globe, nothing is easier than to see the force that retains them in the places where they are placed: it is necessity. He who would wish to abandon his own territory to appropriate a better one would encounter obstacles that he would never succeed in overcoming. If it were numerous, it would be impossible for it to move en masse; if it were not, it would expose itself to being exterminated. It would not only have to vanquish and destroy the nation whose place it wished to usurp: it would have to vanquish, at the same time, the nations that would take its defense. An attempt of this nature would be so menacing to all peoples, that he who formed it would have them all for enemies.

Each people therefore finds the guarantee of its territory, not in a government charged with making justice reign between nations, but in the necessity of defending it to preserve itself; in the seas or the mountains that protect it against invasions; in the support of peoples who have an interest similar to its own; finally, in the obstacles of every kind that it would be necessary to overcome to despoil it of it: it is all these forces united that are called the law of nations.

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Notes

[^14]: In speaking here of things that one can dispose of legitimately, that is to say in a manner conforming to the laws, I mean to speak of the laws inherent to our nature, and not of the acts of government that are designated under the same name. There is sometimes identity between the one and the other; but this does not always occur. [^15]: One must not conclude from this that it is good to attack by force all treaties that one does not find just; the use of force rarely succeeds when one resorts to it before having weighed its disadvantages and advantages, and especially before having exhausted the means furnished by reason and justice. [^16]: W. Lawrence has given the history of the child found in a forest of Hanover. [^17]: Lahontan, Voyage in North America, vol. 2, p. 175. — Byron, vol. 1, ch. 12, p. 167. — Cook, third voyage, vol. 5, bk. IV, ch. 1, p. 68, 67 and 66. Niebuhr, Voyage in Arabia. [^18]: "Territorial property," says a traveler, "does not exist among individual savages, because not cultivating the land, or at most scattering a few grains of corn there temporarily, having for dwelling only miserable huts which they are always ready to abandon, this personal property must be indifferent to them, and would even be burdensome to them; but national property, that which determines where each nation, each tribe has the right to make its hunting excursions, this property exists among them in all its energy. It is to defend it that they wage terrible wars, where the strongest exterminates the weakest, slaughters women and children, as long as the enemy nation exists, until these unfortunate remnants have gone to be incorporated, to merge into other nations." (Robin, Voyage in Louisiana, vol. 2, ch. 51, p. 307-308. Lahontan, Voyage in North America, vol. 2, p. 175. [^19]: The Anglo-Americans who purchase lands from the Savages are never at war with them; those who usurp them are always exposed to hostilities. The state of Pennsylvania has never experienced aggression on their part; but also, before taking possession of this country, its value was paid to the tribe whose property it was. (Weld, Voyage to Canada, vol. 3, ch. 35, p. 102.—Lewis, Voyage in the Pacific Ocean, p. xvj of the preface. Wright, lett. 12, p. 208-209.