The man who works for himself has in view utility. [p238]
The man who works for others has in view value.
Now Property, as I have defined it, is founded on Value, and value being simply a relation, it follows that property is also a relation.
Were there only one man upon the earth, the idea of Property would never enter his mind. Monarch of all he surveyed, surrounded with utilities which he had only to adapt to his use, never encountering any analogous right to serve as a limit to his own, how should it ever come into his head to say This is mine? That would imply the correlative assertion, This is not mine, or This belongs to another. Meum and tuum are inconsistent with isolation, and the word Property necessarily implies relation; but it gives us emphatically to understand that a thing is proper to one person, only by giving us to understand that it is not proper to anybody else.
“The first man,” says Rousseau, “who having enclosed a field, took it into his head to say This is mine, was the true founder of civil society.”
What does the enclosure mean if it be not indicative of exclusion, and consequently of relation? If its object were only to defend the field against the intrusion of animals, it was a precaution, not a sign of property. A boundary, on the contrary, is a mark of property, not of precaution.
Thus men are truly proprietors only in relation to one another; and this being so, of what are they proprietors? Of value, as we discover very clearly in the exchanges they make with each other.
Let us, according to our usual practice, take a very simple case by way of illustration.
Nature labours, and has done so probably from all eternity, to invest spring water with those qualities which fit it for quenching our thirst, and which qualities, so far as we are concerned, constitute its utility. It is assuredly not my work, for it has been elaborated without my assistance, and quite unknown to me. In this respect I can truly say that water is to me the gratuitous gift of God. What is my own proper work is the effort which I have made in going to fetch my supply of water for the day.
Of what do I become proprietor by that act?