If the laborer, who adds to the value of a thing, has a right of property in it, he who maintains this value acquires the same right. For what is maintenance? It is incessant addition,--continuous creation. What is it to cultivate? It is to give the soil its value every year; it is, by annually renewed creation, to prevent the diminution or destruction of the value of a piece of land. Admitting, then, that property is rational and legitimate,--admitting that rent is equitable and just,--I say that he who cultivates acquires property by as good a title as he who clears, or he who improves; and that every time a tenant pays his rent, he obtains a fraction of property in the land entrusted to his care, the denominator of which is equal to the proportion of rent paid. Unless you admit this, you fall into absolutism and tyranny; you recognize class privileges; you sanction slavery. Whoever labors becomes a proprietor--this is an inevitable deduction from the acknowledged principles of political economy and jurisprudence. And when I say proprietor, I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages,--I mean proprietor of the value which he creates, and by which the master alone profits. As all this relates to the theory of wages and of the distribution of products,--and as this matter never has been even partially cleared up,--I ask permission to insist on it: this discussion will not be useless to the work in hand. Many persons talk of admitting working-people to a share in the products and profits; but in their minds this participation is pure benevolence: they have never shown--perhaps never suspected--that it was a natural, necessary right, inherent in labor, and inseparable from the function of producer, even in the lowest forms of his work. This is my proposition: THE LABORER RETAINS, EVEN AFTER HE HAS RECEIVED HIS WAGES, A NATURAL RIGHT OF PROPERTY IN THE THING WHICH HE HAS PRODUCED. I again quote M. Ch. Comte:-- "Some laborers are employed in draining marshes, in cutting down trees and brushwood,--in a word, in cleaning up the soil. They increase the value, they make the amount of property larger; they are paid for the value which they add in the form of food and daily wages: it then becomes the property of the capitalist."