In all these pronouncements property means nothing else than that portion of goods which falls to the individual on the basis of contracts, on which society is to be built up.[176] The property which Proudhon sanctions cannot be a special legal relation, but only a possible part of the substance of the one legal relation which he approves, the relation of contract. It can afford no protection against a group of men whose extent is determined by legal norms, but only against a group of men who have mutually secured a certain portion of goods to each other by contract. Proudhon, therefore, is here using the word "property" in an inexact sense; in the strict sense it can denote only a portion of goods set apart in an involuntary legal relation by particular legal norms. Accordingly, when in the name of justice Proudhon demands a certain distribution of property, this means nothing more than that the contracts on which society is to be built should make a certain sort of provision with respect to the distribution of goods. And the way in which they should determine it is this: that every man is to have the product of his labor. "Let us conceive of wealth as a mass whose elements are held together permanently by a chemical force, and into which new elements incessantly enter and combine in different proportions, but according to a definite law: value is the proportion (the measure) in which each of these elements forms a part of the whole."[177] "I suppose, therefore, a force which combines the elements of wealth in definite proportions and makes of them a homogeneous whole."[178] "This force is LABOR. It is labor, labor alone, that produces all the elements of wealth and combines them, to the last molecule, according to a variable but definite law of proportionality."[179] "Every product is a representative sign of labor."[180] "Every product can consequently be exchanged for another."[181] "If then the tailor, in return for furnishing the value of one day of his work, consumes ten times the weaver's day, it is as if the weaver gave ten days of his life for one day of the tailor's. This is precisely what occurs when a peasant pays a lawyer twelve francs for a document that it costs one hour to draw up; and this inequality, this iniquity in exchange, is the mightiest cause of poverty. Every error in commutative justice is an immolation of the laborer, a transfusion of a man's blood into another man's body."[182]