Land that was formerly useful only for agriculture becomes profitable for a factory or a store. Through its new external relations, the land acquires new utility; or better, its latent and potential uses have become actual. Now these new relations, these utility-creating and value-creating relations, have been established by society, in its corporate capacity through civil institutions and activities, and in its non-corporate capacity through the economic and "social" (in the narrower "society" sense) activities of groups and individuals. In this sense, then, the community has created the increased land values. Has it a strict right to them? a right so rigorous and exact that private appropriation of them is unjust? As we have just seen, men do not admit that mere production of value constitutes a title of ownership. Neither the monopolist who increases value by restricting supply, nor the pace-makers of fashion, who increase value by merely increasing demand, are regarded as possessing a moral right to the value that they have "created." It is increase of utility, and not either actual or virtual increase of scarcity to which men attribute a moral claim. Why do men assign these different ethical qualities to the production of value? Why has the shoemaker a right to the value that he adds to the raw material in making a pair of shoes? What is the precise basis of his right? It cannot be labour merely; for the cotton monopolist has laboured in getting his corner on cotton. It cannot be the fact that the shoemaker's labour is socially useful; for a chemist might spend laborious days and nights producing water from its component elements, and find his product a drug on the market. Yet he would have no reasonable ground of complaint. Why, then, is it reasonable for the shoemaker to require, why has he a right to require payment for the utilities that he produces? Because men want to use his products, and because they have no right to require him to serve them without compensation. He is morally and juridically their equal, and has the same right as they to have access on reasonable terms to the earth and the earth's possibilities of a livelihood. Being thus equal to his fellows, he is under no obligation to subordinate himself to them by becoming a mere instrument for their welfare. To assume that he is obliged to produce socially useful things without remuneration, is to assume that all these propositions are false; it is to assume that his life and personality and personal development are of no intrinsic importance, and that his pursuit of the essential ends of life has no meaning except in so far as may be conducive to his function as an instrument of production. In a word, the ultimate basis of the producer's right to his product, or its value, is the fact that this is the only way in which he can get his just share of the earth's goods, and of the means of life and personal development. His right to compensation does not