“Very well, let an industrial Society, which has appropriated the land, and taken away from man the power of exercising freely and at will his four natural Rights, let this society cede to the individual, in compensation for those Rights, of which it had despoiled him, the Right to Employment. On this principle, rightly understood and applied, the individual has no longer any reason to complain.
“The condition sine quâ non, then, of the Legitimacy of Property is, that Society should concede to the Prolétaire—the man who has no property—the Right to Employment; and, in exchange for a given exertion of activity, assure him of means of subsistence, at least as adequate as such exercise could have procured him in the primitive state.”
I cannot, without being guilty of tiresome repetition, discuss this question with M. Considérant in all its bearings. If I demonstrate, that what he terms uncreated capital is no capital at all; that what he terms the additional value of the soil, is not an additional value, but the total value; he must acknowledge that his argument has fallen to pieces, and, with it, all his complaints of the way in which mankind have judged it proper to live since the days of Adam. But this controversy would oblige me to repeat all that I have already said upon the essentially and indelibly gratuitous character of natural agents.
I shall only remark, that if M. Considérant speaks in behalf of the non-proprietary class, he is so very accommodating that they may think themselves betrayed. What! proprietors have usurped the soil, and all the miracles of vegetation which it displays! they have usurped the sun, the rain, the dew, oxygen, hydrogen, and azote, so far at least as these co-operate in the production of agricultural products—and you ask them to assure to the man who has no property, as a compensation, at least as much of the means of subsistence, in exchange for a given exertion of activity, as that exertion could have procured him in the primitive and savage state!
But do you not see that landed property has not waited for your injunctions in order to be a million times more generous? for to what is your demand limited?
In the primitive state, your four rights of fishing, hunting, gathering the fruits, and pasturing, maintain in existence, or rather in a state of vegetation, amid all the horrors of destitution, nearly one man to the square league of territory. The usurpation of the [p280] land will then be legitimate, according to you, when those who have been guilty of that usurpation support one man for every square league, exacting from him at the same time as much activity as is displayed by a Huron or an Iroquois. Pray remark, that France consists of only thirty thousand square leagues; that consequently, if its whole territory supports thirty thousand inhabitants in that condition of existence which the savage state affords, you renounce in behalf of the non-proprietary class all farther demands upon property. Now, there are thirty millions of Frenchmen who have not an inch of land, and among the number we meet with many—the president of the republic, ministers, magistrates, bankers, merchants, notaries, advocates, physicians, brokers, soldiers, sailors, professors, journalists, etc.—who would certainly not be disposed to exchange their condition for that of an Ioway. Landed property, then, must do much more for us than you exact from it. You demand from it the Right to Employment, up to a certain point—that is to say, until it yields to the masses—and in exchange for a given amount of labour, too—as much subsistence as they could earn in a state of barbarism. Landed property does much more than that—it gives more than the Right to employment—it gives Employment itself, and did it only clear the land-tax, it would do a hundred times more than you ask it to do.
I find to my great regret that I have not yet done with landed property and its value. I have still to state, and to refute, in as few words as possible, an objection which is specious and even formidable.
It is said,
“Your theory is contradicted by facts. Undoubtedly, as long as there is in a country abundance of uncultivated land, the existence of such land will of itself hinder the cultivated land from acquiring an undue value. It is also beyond doubt, that even when all the land has passed into the appropriated domain, if neighbouring nations have extensive tracts ready for the plough, freedom of trade is sufficient to restrain the value of landed property within just limits. In these two cases it would seem that the Price of land can only represent the capital advanced, and the Rent of land the interest of that capital. Whence we must conclude, as you do, that the proper action of the soil and the intervention of natural agents, going for nothing, and not influencing the value of the crops, remain gratuitous, and therefore common. All this is specious. We may have difficulty in discovering the error, and yet this reasoning is erroneous. In order to be convinced of it, it [p281] is sufficient to point to the fact, that there are in France cultivated lands which are worth from 100 francs to 6000 francs the hectare, an enormous difference, which is much easier explained by the difference of fertility than by the difference of the anterior labour applied to these lands. It is vain to deny, then, that fertility has its own value, for not a sale takes place which does not attest it. Every one who purchases a land estate examines its quality, and pays for it accordingly. If, of two properties which lie alongside each other, the one consists of a rich alluvium, and the other of barren sand, the first is surely of more value than the second, although both may have absorbed the same capital, and to say truth, the purchaser gives himself no trouble on that score. His attention is fixed upon the future, and not upon the past. What he looks at is not what the land has cost, but what it will yield, and he knows that its yield will be in proportion to its fertility. Then this fertility has a proper and intrinsic value which is independent of all human labour. To maintain the contrary is to endeavour to base the legitimacy of individual appropriation on a subtilty, or rather on a paradox.”
Let us inquire, then, what is the true foundation of the value of land.