God has, besides, endued matter with forces—gravitation, elasticity, porosity, compressibility, heat, light, electricity, crystallization, vegetable life. He has placed man in the middle of these materials and forces, which he has delivered over to him gratuitously. Men set themselves to exercise their activity upon these materials and forces; and in this way they render service to themselves. They also work for one another, and in this way render reciprocal services. These services, compared by the act of exchange, give rise to the idea of Value, and Value to that of Property. Each man, then, becomes an owner or proprietor in proportion to the services he has rendered. But the materials and forces given by God to man gratuitously, at the beginning, have continued gratuitous, and are and must continue to be so through all our transactions; for in the estimates and appreciations to which exchange gives rise, the ‹equivalents› are ‹human services›, not the ‹gifts of God›. Hence it follows that no human being, so long as transactions are free, can ever cease to be the usufructuary of these gifts. A single condition is laid down, which is, that we shall execute the labour necessary to make them available to us, or, if any one makes this exertion for us, that we make for him an equivalent exertion. If this account of the matter be true, Property is indeed unassailable. [p250] The universal instinct of mankind, more infallible than the lucubrations of any individual, had adopted this view of the subject without refining upon it, when theory began to scrutinize the foundations of Property. Theory unhappily began in confusion, mistaking Utility for Value, and attributing an inherent ‹value›, independent of all human service, to the materials or forces of nature. From that moment property became unintelligible, and incapable of justification. For utility is the relation between commodities and our organization. It necessarily implies neither efforts, nor transactions, nor comparisons. We can conceive of it ‹per se›, and in relation to man in a state of isolation. Value, on the contrary, is a relation of man to man. To exist at all, it must exist in duplicate. Nothing isolated can be compared. Value implies that the person in possession of it does not transfer it except for an equivalent value. The theory, then, which confounds these two ideas, takes for granted that a person, in effecting an exchange, gives pretended value of natural creation for true value of human creation, utility which exacts no labour for utility which does exact it; in other words, that he can profit by the labour of another without working himself. Property, thus understood, is called first of all a ‹necessary monopoly›, then simply a ‹monopoly›,—then it is branded as ‹illegitimate›, and last of all as ‹robbery›.