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Excerpt from An Essay on Possession in the Common Law, Parts I and II, Vol. 3
Seeming anomaly will be found indispensable for the adequate protection of true ownership itself. Another element which no doubt has been important in the earlier historical develop ment of the law, and to which some great authorities have attached exclusive or all but exclusive importance in modern times, is the interest of public peace and order. Men will defend that which they deem their own even if the law pur ports to forbid them; and the wholesale allowance of redress by private force, or exposure of wrongful possessors to dis possession by newcomers having no better right, would create more and greater evils than any that could be thus remedied or prevented. But in forbidding existing relations of persons to things to be disturbed by private violence, or acts likely to provoke violence, the law must n eeds, at that stage, protect the unjust with the just. If the ultimate justice of the matter were always manifest at first sight, there would be no call for provisional protection. It is also said that possession is in a normal state of things the outward sign of ownership or title, and therefore the possessor is presumed to be or to represent the true owner; some have gone so far as to say that, apart from this, the mere will of a possessor to hold the object for himself is in the eye of the law relatively meritorious as against any one not showing a better title. However, the comparative worth of the philosophical or semi-philosophical theories of Possession cannot be weighed to much purpose until one has mastered in some detail the actual contents of the law.1.
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