12,
13.)
A: Conventional law all that, arbitrary customs, fashions that pass: the
essential remains always. Show me a country where it was honourable to
rob me of the fruit of my toil, to break one's promise, to lie in order
to hurt, to calumniate, to assassinate, to poison, to be ungrateful
towards a benefactor, to beat one's father and one's mother when they
offer you food.
B: Have you forgotten that Jean-Jacques, one of the fathers of the
modern Church, has said that "the first man who dared enclose and
cultivate a piece of land" was the enemy "of the human race," that he
should have been exterminated, and that "the fruits of the earth are for
all, and that the land belongs to none"? Have we not already examined
together this lovely proposition which is so useful to society
(Discourse on Inequality, second part)?
A: Who is this Jean-Jacques? he is certainly not either John the
Baptist, nor John the Evangelist, nor James the Greater, nor James the
Less[19]; it must be some Hunnish wit who wrote that abominable
impertinence or some poor joker _bufo magro_ who wanted to laugh at what
the entire world regards as most serious. For instead of going to spoil
the land of a wise and industrious neighbour, he had only to imitate
him; and every father of a family having followed this example, behold
soon a very pretty village formed. The author of this passage seems to
me a very unsociable animal.
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