The right of inheriting property is a law of men; it was established for their welfare and can only be continued on that condition. He who, at the beginning of society, staked out a piece of ground, and threw there some seed which nature had spontaneously produced elsewhere, could never have obtained on this title alone the exclusive right of holding the ground for his descendants forever.

— NECKER (afterward Louis XVI’s Minister of Finance), Essay on the Corn Laws (1775),

Oeuvres Completes, Vol. I., p. 142.