Thus, Senior has said that “those who have appropriated natural agents receive, under the form of rent, a recompense without having made any sacrifice. They merely hold out their hands to receive the offerings of the rest of the community.” Scrope tells us that “landed property is an artificial restriction imposed upon the enjoyment of those gifts which the Creator has intended for the satisfaction of the wants of all.” J. B. Say has these words: “Arable lands ‹would seem› to form a portion of natural wealth, seeing that they are not of human creation, and that nature has given them to man ‹gratuitously›. But as this description of wealth is not fugitive, like air and water,—as a field is a space fixed and marked out which ‹certain› men have succeeded in appropriating, to the exclusion of all others who have given their consent to this appropriation, land, which was natural [p155] and ‹gratuitous› property, has now ‹become› social wealth, the use of which must be paid for.” Truly, if it be so, Proudhon is justified in proposing this terrible question, followed by an affirmation still more terrible:— “To whom belongs the rent of land? To the producer of land, without doubt. Who made the land? God. Then, proprietor, begone!” Yes, by a vicious definition, Political Economy has handed over logic to the Communists. I will break this terrible weapon in their hands, or rather they shall surrender it to me cheerfully. The consequences will disappear when I have annihilated the principle. And I undertake to demonstrate that if, in the production of wealth, the action of nature is combined with the action of man, the first—gratuitous and common in its own nature—remains gratuitous and common in all our transactions; that the second alone represents ‹services›, ‹value›; that the action of man alone is remunerated; and that it alone is the foundation, explanation, and justification of Property. In a word, I maintain that, relatively to each other, men are proprietors only of the value of things, and that in transferring products from hand to hand, what they stipulate for exclusively is value, that is to say, reciprocal services:—all the qualities, properties, and utilities, which these products derive from nature being obtained by them into the bargain. If Political Economy hitherto, in disregarding this fundamental consideration, has shaken the guardian principle of property, by representing it as an artificial institution, necessary, indeed, but unjust, she has by the same act left in the shade, and completely unperceived, another admirable phenomenon the most touching dispensation of Providence to the creature—the phenomenon of ‹progressive community›.