es as much as a peasant? An unavoidable difficulty, which has
never been solved save by avarice, necessity, and oppression. It is not
thus that the right of talent should be determined. But how is it to be
determined?

4. I say, first, that the physician must be treated with as much favor
as any other producer, that he must not be placed below the level of
others. This I will not stop to prove. But I add that neither must he be
lifted above that level; because his talent is collective property for
which he did not pay, and for which he is ever in debt.

Just as the creation of every instrument of production is the result of
collective force, so also are a man's talent and knowledge the product
of universal intelligence and of general knowledge slowly accumulated
by a number of masters, and through the aid of many inferior industries.
When the physician has paid for his teachers, his books, his diplomas,
and all the other items of his educational expenses, he has no more paid
for his talent than the capitalist pays for his house and land when he
gives his employees their wages. The man of talent has contributed to
the production in himself of a useful instrument. He has, then, a share
in its possession; he is not its proprietor. There exist side by side in
him a free laborer and an accumulated social capital. As a laborer, he
is charged with the use of an instrument, with the superintendence of a
machine; namely, his capacity. As capital, he is not his own master; he
uses himself, not for his own benefit, but for that of others.

Even if talent did not find in its own excellence a reward for the
sacrifices which it costs, still would it be easier to find reasons for
lowering its reward than for raising it above the common level.
Every producer receives an education; every laborer is a talent, a
capacity,--that is, a piece of collective property. But all talents are
not equally costly. It takes but few teachers, but few years, and but
little study, to make a farmer or a mechanic: the generative effort
and--if I may venture to use such language--the period of social
gestation are proportional to the loftiness of the capacity. But while
the physician, the poet, the artist, and the savant produce but little,
and that slowly, the productions of the farmer are much less uncertain,
and do not require so long a time. Whatever be then the capacity of a
man,--when this capacity is once created,--it does not belong to him.
Like t