The conclusion to be deduced from all I have said is, that as long as there exists in a country abundance of land to be cleared and brought under cultivation, the proprietor, whether he cultivates, or lets, or sells it, enjoys no privilege, no monopoly, no exceptional [p266] advantage,—above all, that he levies no tax upon the gratuitous liberality of nature. How could it be so, if we suppose men to be free? Have not people who are possessed of capital and energy a perfect right to make a choice between agriculture, manufactures, commerce, fisheries, navigation, the arts, or the learned professions? Will not capital and industry always tend to those departments which give extraordinary returns? Will they not desert those which entail loss? Is this inevitable shifting and redistribution of human efforts not sufficient to establish, according to our hypothesis, an equilibrium of profit and remuneration? Do agriculturists in the United States make fortunes more rapidly than merchants, shipowners, bankers, or physicians,—as would necessarily happen if they received the wages of their labour like other people, and the recompense of nature’s work into the bargain? Would you like to know how a proprietor even in the United States could establish for himself a monopoly? I shall try to explain it. Suppose Jonathan to assemble all the proprietors of the United States, and hold this language to them: “I desired to sell my crops, and I found no one who would give me a high enough price for them. I wished then to let my land, and encountered the same difficulty. I resolved to sell it, but still experienced the same disappointment. My exactions have always been met by their telling me, that ‹there is more land in the neighbourhood›; so that, horrible to say, my services are estimated by the community like the services of other people, ‹at what they are worth›, in spite of the flattering promises of theorists. They will give me nothing, absolutely nothing, for those productive and indestructible powers of the soil, for those natural agents, for the solar and lunar rays, for the rain, the wind, the dew, the frost, which I was led to believe were mine, but of which I turn out to be only the nominal proprietor. Is it not an iniquitous thing that I am remunerated only for my services, and at a rate, too, reduced by competition? You are all suffering under the same oppression, you are all alike the victims of anarchical competition. It would be no longer so, you may easily perceive, if we ‹organized› landed property, if we laid our heads together to prevent anyone henceforward from clearing a yard of American soil. In that case, population pressing, by its increase, on a nearly fixed amount of subsistence, we should be able to make our own prices and attain immense wealth, which would be a great boon for all other classes; for being rich, we should provide them with work.”