“If it be impossible,” he remarks, “for production to be effected, not only without land and without capital, but without these means of production previously becoming ‹property›, may it not be said that proprietors of land and capital exercise a productive function, since, without the employment of these means, production would not take place?—a convenient function no doubt, but which, in the present state of society, presupposes accumulation, which is the result of production or saving,” etc. The confusion here is palpable. The accumulation has been effected by the proprietor in his character of Capitalist—a character with which at present we have no concern. But what M. Say represents as convenient is the part played by the proprietor, in his proper character of proprietor, exacting a price for the gifts of God. It is this part which it is necessary to vindicate, and it has no connexion with either accumulation or saving. “If, then, property in land and in capital” (why assimilate the two?) “be the fruit of production, I am warranted in representing such property as a working and productive machine, for which its author, although sitting with his hands across, is entitled to exact a recompense.” Still the same confusion. The man who constructs a machine is proprietor of a ‹capital›, from which he legitimately derives an income, because he is paid, not for the labour of the machine, but for his own labour in constructing it. But ‹land›, or ‹territorial› property, is ‹not the result of human production›. What right, then, have we to be paid for its co-operation? The author has here mixed up two different kinds of property in the same category, in order that the same reasons which justify the one may serve for the vindication of the other. «Blanqui.»—“The agriculturist who tills, manures, sows, and reaps his field, furnishes labour, without which nothing would be produced. But the action of the soil in making the seed germinate, and of the sun in bringing the plant to maturity, are independent of that labour, and co-operate in the formation of the ‹value› represented by the harvest. . . Smith and other Economists pretend that the labour of [p256] man is the exclusive source of value. Assuredly the industry of the labourer is not the exclusive source of the value of a sack of corn or a bushel of potatoes. His skill can no more succeed in producing the phenomenon of germination than the patience of the alchymist could succeed in discovering the philosopher’s stone. This is evident.” It is impossible to imagine a more complete confusion than we have here, first between utility and value, and then between onerous and gratuitous utility.