Now, by the great social organization the whole civilized body (and
soon we shall say the whole human race) keeps up a combined assault on
Nature for the means of subsistence. Civilized society may be said to
be maintained in an unnatural position, at an elevation above the
earth, or above the natural state of human society. It can be
maintained there only by an efficient organization of the social effort
and by capital. At its elevation it supports far greater numbers than
it could support on any lower stage. Members of society who come into
it as it is today can live only by entering into the organization. If
numbers increase, the organization must be perfected, and capital must
increase--_i.e._, power over Nature. If the society does not keep up
its power, if it lowers its organization or wastes its capital, it
falls back toward the natural state of barbarism from which it rose,
and in so doing it must sacrifice thousands of its weakest members.
Hence human society lives at a constant strain forward and upward, and
those who have most interest that this strain be successfully kept up,
that the social organization be perfected, and that capital be
increased, are those at the bottom.

The notion of property which prevails among us today is, that a man has
a right to the thing which he has made by his labor. This is a very
modern and highly civilized conception. Singularly enough, it has been
brought forward dogmatically to prove that property in land is not
reasonable, because man did not make land. A man cannot "make" a
chattel or product of any kind whatever without first appropriating
land, so as to get the ore, wood, wool, cotton, fur, or other raw
material. All that men ever appropriate land for is to get out of it
the natural materials on which they exercise their industry.
Appropriation, therefore, precedes labor-production, both historically
and logically. Primitive races regarded, and often now regard,