That there are satisfactions which men enjoy, gratuitously and in common, upon a footing of the most perfect equality,—that there is in the social order, underlying Property, a real Community,—no one will dispute. To see this it is not necessary that you should be either an Economist or a Socialist, but that you should have eyes in your head. In certain respects all the children of God are treated in precisely the same way. All are equal as regards the law of gravitation, which attaches them to the earth, as regards the air we breathe, the light of day, the water of the brook. This vast and measureless common fund, which has nothing whatever to do with Value or Property, J. B. Say denominates ‹natural wealth›, in opposition to ‹social wealth›; Proudhon, ‹natural property›, in opposition to ‹acquired property›; Considérant, ‹natural capital›, in opposition to ‹capital which is created›; Saint-Chamans, the ‹wealth of enjoyment›, in opposition to the ‹wealth of value›. We have denominated it ‹gratuitous utility›, in contradistinction to ‹onerous utility›. Call it what you will, it exists, and that entitles us to say that there is among men a common fund of gratuitous and equal satisfactions. And if wealth, ‹social›, ‹acquired›, ‹created›, ‹of value›, ‹onerous›, in a word, Property, is unequally distributed, we cannot affirm that it is unjustly so, seeing that it is in each man’s case proportional to the ‹services› which give rise to it, and of which it is simply the measure and estimate. Besides, it is clear that this Inequality is lessened by the existence of the common fund, in virtue of the mathematical rule: the relative inequality of two unequal numbers is lessened by adding equal numbers to each of them. When our inventories, then, show that one man is twice as rich as another man, that proportion ceases to be exact when we take into consideration their equal share in the gratuitous utility furnished by nature, and the inequality would be gradually effaced and wiped away if this common fund were itself progressive. The problem, then, is to find out whether this ‹common fund› is a fixed invariable quantity, given to mankind by Providence in the beginning, and once for all, above which the ‹appropriated fund› is superimposed, apart from the existence of any relation or action between these two orders of phenomena. Economists have concluded that the social order had no influence upon this natural and common fund of wealth; and this is their reason for excluding it from the domain of Political Economy. [p242] The Socialists go farther. They believe that the constitution of society tends to make this common fund pass into the region of Property, that it consecrates, to the profit of a few, the usurpation of what belongs to all; and this is the reason why they rise up against Political Economy, which denies this fatal tendency, and against modern society, which submits to it.