We reckoned the improvements of the art of war among the triumphs of
science, and yet Napoleon[273] conquered Europe by the bivouac, which
consisted of falling back on naked valor, and disencumbering it of all
aids. The Emperor held it impossible to make a perfect army, says Las
Casas,[274] "without abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries, and
carriages, until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his handmill, and bake his
bread himself."

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is
composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to
the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a
nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments
which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away
from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem
the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property,
and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be
assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what
each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes
ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially
he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental,--came to him by
inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having;
it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there,
because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man
is, does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is
living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or
revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually
renews itself wherever the man breathes. "Thy lot or portion of life,"