o the community a _ground-rent_ (for I know of no better term
to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this
ground-rent that the fund proposed in this plan is to issue.

It is deducible, as well from the nature of the thing as from all the
histories transmitted to us, that the idea of landed property commenced
with cultivation, and that there was no such thing as landed property
before that time. It could not exist in the first state of man, that
of hunters. It did not exist in the second state, that of shepherds:
neither Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, nor Job, so far as the history of the
Bible may be credited in probable things, were owners of land. Their
property consisted, as is always enumerated, in flocks and herds, and
they travelled with them from place to place. The frequent contentions
at that time, about the use of a well in the dry country of Arabia,
where those people lived, also shew that there was no landed property.
It was not admitted that land could be claimed as property.

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not
make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had
no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither
did the creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the
first title-deeds should issue. Whence then, arose the idea of landed
property? I answer as before, that when cultivation began the idea of
landed property began with it, from the impossibility of separating the
improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that
improvement was made. The value of the improvement so far exceeded the
value of the natural earth, at that time, as to absorb it; till, in the
end, the common right of all became confounded into the cultivated right
of the individual. But there are, nevertheless, distinct species of
rights, and will continue to be so long as the earth endures.

It is only by tracing things to their origin that we can gain rightful
ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the
boundary that divides right from wrong, and teaches every man to know
his own. I have entitled this tract Agrarian Justice, to distinguish it
from Agrarian Law. Nothing could be more unjust than Agrarian Law in a
country improved by cultivation; for though every man, as an inhabitant
of the earth, is a joint proprietor of it in its natural state, it
does not follow that he is a joint p