called, has
operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the
other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural
state.

It is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but
it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state. The
reason is, that man in a natural state, subsisting by hunting, requires
ten times the quantity of land to range over to procure himself
sustenance, than would support him in a civilized state, where the
earth is cultivated. When, therefore, a country becomes populous by the
additional aids of cultivation, art, and science, there is a necessity
of preserving things in that state; because without it there cannot be
sustenance for more, perhaps, than a tenth part of its inhabitants. The
thing, therefore, now to be done is to remedy the evils and preserve the
benefits that have arisen to society by passing from the natural to that
which is called the civilized state.

In taking the matter upon this ground, the first principle of
civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the
condition of every person born into the world, after a state of
civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born
before that period. But the fact is, that the condition of millions, in
every country in Europe, is far worse than if they had been born before
civilization began, or had been born among the Indians of North America
at the present day. I will shew how this fact has happened.

It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural
uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, _the common
property of the human race_. In that state every man would have been
born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with the
rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions,
vegetable and animal.

But the earth in its natural state, as before said, is capable of
supporting but a small number of inhabitants compared with what it
is capable of doing in a cultivated state. And as it is impossible to
separate the improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon
which that improvement is made, the idea of landed property arose from
that inseparable connection; but it is nevertheless true, that it is
the value of the improvement only, and not the earth itself, that is
individual property. Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land,
owes t