Review all the permanent ameliorations of which the sum total makes up the value of land, and you will find that to each of them [p278] the same remark applies. Having filled up the drain, demolish the fence, and so force the agriculturist to mount guard upon his field; destroy the well, pull down the barn, dig up the road, burn the plough, efface the levelling, remove the artificial mould; replace in the field the loose stones, the weeds, the roots of trees; you will then have realized the Utopia of Equality. The land, and the human race along with it, wall have reverted to the primitive state, and will have no longer any value. The crops will have no longer any connexion with capital. Their price will be freed from that accursed element called interest. Everything, literally everything, will be done by actual labour, visible to the naked eye. Political Economy will be much simplified. Our country will support a man to the square league. The rest of her inhabitants will have died of hunger;—but then it can no longer be said that property is a monopoly, an injustice, and a theft. Let us not be insensible, then, to those economic harmonies which unfold themselves to our view more and more as we analyze the ideas of exchange, of value, of capital, of interest, of property, of community.—Will it indeed be given me to describe the entire circle, and complete the demonstration?—But we have already, perhaps, advanced sufficiently far to be convinced that the social world, not less than the material world, bears the impress of a Divine hand, from which flows wisdom and goodness, and towards which we should raise our eyes in gratitude and admiration. I cannot forbear reverting here to the view of this subject taken by M. Considérant. Setting out with the proposition, that the soil has a proper value, independent of all human labour, that it constitutes ‹primitive and uncreated capital›, he concludes, in perfect consistency with his own views, that ‹appropriation› is ‹usurpation›. This supposed iniquity leads him to indulge in violent tirades against the institutions of modern society. On the other hand, he allows that permanent ameliorations confer an ‹additional value› on this primitive capital, an accessory so mixed up with the principal that we cannot separate them. What are we to do, then? for we have here a total value composed of two elements, of which one, the fruit of labour, is legitimate property; and the other, the gift of God, appropriated by man, is an iniquitous usurpation. This is no trifling difficulty. M. Considérant resolves it by reference to the Right to Employment [‹Droit au travail›]. “The development of Mankind evidently demands that the Soil shall not be left in its wild and uncultivated state. The destiny of the human race is opposed to property in land retaining ‹its rude and primitive form›.