In fact, machines, the instruments of labour, are, like the soil, producers of ‹utility›. If that utility has ‹value›, it is paid for, for the word value implies right to payment. But to whom is the payment made? To the proprietor of the machine, without doubt. Is it for a personal service? Then say at once that the value is in the service. But if you say that it is necessary to make a payment first for the service, and a second payment for the utility produced by the machine independently of the human action, which has been already recompensed, then I ask you to whom does this second payment go, and how has the man who has been already remunerated for all his services a right to demand anything more? The truth is, that the utility which is produced by nature is ‹gratuitous›, and therefore ‹common›, like that produced by the instruments of labour. It is gratuitous and common on one condition, that we take the trouble, that we render ourselves the service of appropriating it; or, if we give that trouble to or demand that service from another, that we cede to him in return an ‹equivalent› service. It is in these services, thus compared, that value resides, and not at all in natural utility. The exertion may be more or less great—that makes a difference in the value, not in the utility. When we stand near a spring, water is gratuitous for us all on condition that we stoop to lift it. If we ask our neighbour to take that trouble for us, then a convention, a bargain, a ‹value› makes its appearance, but that does not make the water otherwise than gratuitous. If we are an hour’s walk from the spring, the basis of the transaction will be different; but the difference is one of degree, not of principle. The value has not, on that account, passed into [p165] the water or into its utility. The water continues still ‹gratuitous› on condition of fetching it, or of remunerating those who, by a bargain freely made and discussed, agree to spare us that exertion by making it themselves. It is the same thing in every case. We are surrounded by utilities, but we must ‹stoop to appropriate them›. That exertion is sometimes very simple, and often very complicated. Nothing is more easy, in the general case, than to draw water, the utility of which has been prepared by nature beforehand. It is not so easy to obtain corn, the utility of which nature has equally prepared. This is why these two efforts differ in degree though not in principle. The service is more or less onerous; therefore more or less ‹valuable›—the utility is, and remains always, ‹gratuitous›.