earth would be hardly sufficient to support a savage in distress;
to-day it supplies one thousand persons with the means of existence.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine parts of this land is the legitimate
property of the possessors; only one-thousandth of the value has been
usurped."

A peasant admitted one day, at confession, that he had destroyed a
document which declared him a debtor to the amount of three hundred
francs. Said the father confessor, "You must return these three hundred
francs." "No," replied the peasant, "I will return a penny to pay for
the paper."

M. Ch. Comte's logic resembles this peasant's honesty. The soil has not
only an integrant and actual value, it has also a potential value,--a
value of the future,--which depends on our ability to make it valuable,
and to employ it in our work. Destroy a bill of exchange, a promissory
note, an annuity deed,--as a paper you destroy almost no value at all;
but with this paper you destroy your title, and, in losing your title,
you deprive yourself of your goods. Destroy the land, or, what is the
same thing, sell it,--you not only transfer one, two, or several crops,
but you annihilate all the products that you could derive from it; you
and your children and your children's children.

When M. Ch. Comte, the apostle of property and the eulogist of labor,
supposes an alienation of the soil on the part of the government, we
must not think that he does so without reason and for no purpose; it
is a necessary part of his position. As he rejected the theory of
occupancy, and as he knew, moreover, that labor could not constitute the
right in the absence of a previous permission to occupy, he was obliged
to connect this permission with the authority of the government, which
means that property is based upon the sovereignty of the people;
in other words, upon universal consent. This theory we have already
considered.

To say that property is the daughter of labor, and then to give labor
material on which to exercise itself, is, if I am not mistaken, to
reason in a circle. Contradictions will result from it.

"A piece of land of a certain size produces food enough to supply a man
for one day. If the possessor, through his labor, discovers some method
of making it produce enough for two days, he doubles its value. This
new value is his work, his creation: it is taken from nobody; it is his
property."

I maintain that the possessor is paid for his trouble and ind