170 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY
train of labor to take from it all that which, in the product, exeeded the actual cost. Property fulfilled a mystic duty by representing the community face to face with the cultivator. In the design of Providence the cultivator is nothing but a responsible laborer, who must give an account to society of all that he reaps in excess of his legitimate wages. . . . . By essence and destina- tion, therefore, rent is an instrument of distributive justice, one of the thousand means which economic genius puts into operation in order to arrive at equality. It is an immense valuation executed contradictorily by the landlords and farmers, without the possibility of collision, in a superior interest, and the definite result of which must be to equalise the possession of the land between the exploiters of the soil and the industrial com- munity, . . . . It required nothing less than this magic of property to drag from the cultivator the excess of the product which he could not be prevented from re- garding as his, and of which he believed himself to be the sole author. Rent, or rather property, broke down agricultural egoism and created a solidarity to which no power, no partition of the land, could have given birth.
. . At present, the moral effect of property secured, it only remains to distribute the rent.”
All this jumble of words may be reduced to this : Ricardo says that the excess of the price of agricultural products over their cost of production, including the ordinary profit and interest of capital, gives the measure of the rent. M. Proudhon does better. He makes the proprietor intervene, as a deus ex machina, who drags from the cultivator all the excess of his production over the actual cost of production. He makes use of the intervention of the proprietor, to explain property, of the landlord, to explain rent. He answers the problem by
