And let me here remark in passing, that the moral or immoral has nothing to do with labour, but with desire; and that society is improved, not by rendering the producer, but the consumer, more moral. What an outcry was raised against the English on account of their cultivating opium in India for the deliberate purpose, it was said, of poisoning the Chinese! This was to misunderstand and misapply the principle of morality. No one will ever be effectually prevented from producing a commodity which, being in demand, is possessed of value. It is for the man who demands a particular species of enjoyment to calculate the effects of it; and it is in vain that we attempt to divorce foresight from responsibility. Our vine-growers produce wine, and will produce it as long as it possesses value, without troubling themselves to inquire whether this wine leads to drunkenness in Europe or to suicide in America. It is the judgment which men form as to their wants and satisfactions that determines the direction of labour. This is true even of man in an isolated state; and if a foolish vanity had spoken more loudly to Robinson Crusoe than hunger, he would, in place of devoting his time to the chase, have employed it in arranging feathers for his hat. It is the same with nations as with individuals—serious people have serious pursuits, and frivolous people devote themselves to frivolous occupations. But to return: The man who works for himself has in view utility. [p238] The man who works for others has in view value. Now Property, as I have defined it, is founded on Value, and value being simply a relation, it follows that property is also a relation. Were there only one man upon the earth, the idea of Property would never enter his mind. Monarch of all he surveyed, surrounded with utilities which he had only to adapt to his use, never encountering any analogous right to serve as a limit to his own, how should it ever come into his head to say ‹This is mine›? That would imply the correlative assertion, ‹This is not mine›, or ‹This belongs to another›. ‹Meum› and ‹tuum› are inconsistent with isolation, and the word Property necessarily implies relation; but it gives us emphatically to understand that a thing is ‹proper› to one person, only by giving us to understand that it is not ‹proper› to anybody else. “The first man,” says Rousseau, “who having enclosed a field, took it into his head to say ‹This is mine›, was the true founder of civil society.” What does the enclosure mean if it be not indicative of exclusion, and consequently of relation? If its object were only to defend the field against the intrusion of animals, it was a precaution, not a sign of property. A boundary, on the contrary, is a mark of property, not of precaution. Thus men are truly proprietors only in relation to one another; and this being so, of what are they proprietors? Of value, as we discover very clearly in the exchanges they make with each other.