Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/176

 having caused the reality to vanish, human activity threatening to lose itself in space, it became necessary to attach it more closely to nature; but rent was the price of this new contract."

"The man with forty crowns" represents a Proudhon to come: "My Lord the creator, if you please: each is master in his world; but you will never make me believe that this world where we are is of glass." In such a world, where credit was a means for losing one's self in space, it is quite possible for property to be necessary in order to attach man to nature. In the world of real people, where property in land always precedes credit, the horror vacui of M. Proudhon could not exist.

The existence of rent once admitted, whatever may have been its origin, it is contradictorily debated between farmer and landlord. What is the last term of this debate—in other words, what is the mean quota of rent? Here is what M. Proudhon says:

"The theory of Ricardo answers this question. At the beginning of society, when man, newly arrived on earth, had before him only immense forests, when the earth was vast and industry was in its infancy, rent was nil. Land, not yet cultivated by labor, was an object of utility; it was not a value in exchange. It was common, not social. Little by little the multiplication of families and the progress of agriculture caused the price of land to make itself felt. Labor gave its value to the soil: from that sprang rent. The more fruitful a field, with the same quantity of labor, the more it was esteemed; moreover, the tendency of the proprietors was always to attribute to themselves the whole of the fruits of the soil, less the wages of the cultivator, that is to say less the cost of production, Thus property followed in the