Landed Property receives the first blow, and so it should. Not that natural agents do not bear their part in all manufactures, but these agents manifest themselves more strikingly to the eyes of the vulgar in the phenomena of vegetable and animal life, in the production of food, and of what are improperly called ‹matières premières› [raw materials], which are the special products of agriculture. Besides, if there be any one monopoly more revolting than another, it is undoubtedly a monopoly which applies to the first necessaries of life. The confusion which I am exposing, and which is specious in a scientific view, since no theorist I am acquainted with has got rid of it, becomes still more specious when we look at what is passing around us. We see the landed Proprietor frequently living without labour, and we draw the conclusion, which is plausible enough, that “he must surely be remunerated for something else than his work.” And what can this something else be, if not the fecundity, the productiveness, the co-operation of the soil as an instrument? It is, then, the ‹rent of land› which we must brand, in the language [p251] of the times, with the names of necessary monopoly, privilege, illegitimacy, theft. We must admit that the authors of this theory have encountered a fact which must have powerfully tended to mislead them. Few land estates in Europe have escaped from conquest and all its attendant abuses; and science has confounded the violent methods by which landed property has been acquired with the methods by which it is naturally formed. But we must not imagine that the false definition of the word ‹value› tends only to unsettle landed property. Logic is a terrible and indefatigable power, whether it sets out with a good or a bad principle! As the earth, it is said, makes light, heat, electricity, vegetable life, etc., co-operate in the production of value, does not capital in the same way make gravitation, elasticity, the wind, etc., concur in producing value? There are other men, then, besides agriculturists who are paid for the intervention of natural agents. This remuneration comes to capitalists in the shape of Interest, just as it comes to proprietors in the shape of Rent. War, then, must be declared against Interest as it has been against Rent! Property has had a succession of blows aimed at it in the name of this principle, false as I think, true according to the Economists and ‹Egalitaires›, namely, that ‹natural agents possess or create value›. This is a postulate upon which all schools are agreed. They differ only in the boldness or timidity of their deductions. The Economists say that ‹property› (in land) ‹is a monopoly›, but a monopoly which is necessary, and which must be maintained. The Socialists say that ‹property› (in land) ‹is a monopoly›, but a monopoly which is necessary, and which must be maintained,—and they demand compensation for it in the shape of right to employment [‹le droit au travail›].