I might make sad work of his rhetoric, should I undertake to dissect it; but I confine myself for the present to his philosophy.
If M.Troplong had only known how to think and reflect, before abandoning the original fact of occupancy and plunging into the theory of labor, he would have asked himself: "What is it to occupy ?" And he would have discovered that OCCUPANCY is only a generic term by which all modes of possession are expressed,--seizure, station, immanence, habitation, cultivation, use, consumption, &c.; that labor, consequently, is but one of a thousand forms of occupancy.

He would have understood, finally, that the right of possession which is born of labor is governed by the same general laws as that which results from the simple seizure of things.

What kind of a legist is he who declaims when he ought to reason, who continually mistakes his metaphors for legal axioms, and who does not so much as know how to obtain a universal by induction, and form a category?
If labor is identical with occupancy, the only benefit which it secures to the laborer is the right of individual possession of the object of his labor; if it differs from occupancy, it gives birth to a right equal only to itself,--that is, a right which begins, continues, and ends, with the labor of the occupant.

It is for this reason, in the words of the law, that one cannot acquire a just title to a thing by labor alone.
He must also hold it for a year and a day, in order to be regarded as its possessor; and possess it twenty or thirty years, in order to become its proprietor.
These preliminaries established, M.Troplong's whole structure falls of its own weight, and the inferences, which he attempts to draw, vanish.
"Property once acquired by occupation and labor, it naturally preserves itself, not only by the same means, but also by the refusal of the holder to abdicate; for from the very fact that it has risen to the height of a right, it is its nature to perpetuate itself and to last for an indefinite period....

Rights, considered from an ideal point of view, are imperishable and eternal; and time, which affects only the contingent, can no more disturb them than it can injure God himself." It is astonishing that our author, in speaking of the IDEAL, TIME, and ETERNITY, did not work into his sentence the DIVINE WINGS of Plato,--so fashionable to-day in philosophical works.
With the exception of falsehood, I hate nonsense more than any thing else in the world.