Peculate - Common Property

(Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892), chapter 1, part II)

Millions of human beings have labored to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves today. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labor to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of these machines which embody the genius of humans.

Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have labored to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labor of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts.

Common property.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of these machines which embody the genius of humans.

Every machine has had the same history--a long record of sleepless nights and poverty, of disillusions and joys, of partial improvements, discovered by several generations of nameless workers.