IX.
LANDED PROPERTY.
If the leading idea of this work is well founded, the relations of mankind with the external world must be viewed in this way:
God created the earth. On it, and within it, he has placed a multitude of things which are useful to man, inasmuch as they are adapted to satisfy his wants.
God has, besides, endued matter with forces—gravitation, elasticity, porosity, compressibility, heat, light, electricity, crystallization, vegetable life.
He has placed man in the middle of these materials and forces, which he has delivered over to him gratuitously.
Men set themselves to exercise their activity upon these materials and forces; and in this way they render service to themselves. They also work for one another, and in this way render reciprocal services. These services, compared by the act of exchange, give rise to the idea of Value, and Value to that of Property.
Each man, then, becomes an owner or proprietor in proportion to the services he has rendered. But the materials and forces given by God to man gratuitously, at the beginning, have continued gratuitous, and are and must continue to be so through all our transactions; for in the estimates and appreciations to which exchange gives rise, the equivalents are human services, not the gifts of God.
Hence it follows that no human being, so long as transactions are free, can ever cease to be the usufructuary of these gifts. A single condition is laid down, which is, that we shall execute the labour necessary to make them available to us, or, if any one makes this exertion for us, that we make for him an equivalent exertion.