made them not
his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and
common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother
of all, had done; and so they became his private right. And will any one
say, he had no right to those acorns or apples, he thus appropriated,
because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a
robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If
such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding
the plenty God had given him. We see in commons, which remain so by
compact, that it is the taking any part of what is common, and removing
it out of the state nature leaves it in, which begins the property;
without which the common is of no use. And the taking of this or that
part, does not depend on the express consent of all the commoners. Thus
the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I
have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with
others, become my property, without the assignation or consent of any
body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state
they were in, hath fixed my property in them.

Sect. 29. By making an explicit consent of every commoner, necessary to
any one's appropriating to himself any part of what is given in common,
children or servants could not cut the meat, which their father or
master had provided for them in common, without assigning to every one
his peculiar part. Though the water running in the fountain be every
one's, yet who can doubt, but that in the pitcher is his only who drew
it out? His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it
was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath thereby
appropriated it to himself.

Sect. 30. Thus this law of reason makes the deer that Indian's who hath
killed it; it is allowed to be his goods, who hath bestowed his labour
upon it, though before it was the common right of every one. And amongst
those who are counted the civilized part of mankind, who have made and
multiplied positive laws to determine property, this original law of
nature, for the beginning of property, in what was before common, still
takes place; and by virtue thereof, what fish any one catches in the
ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind; or what
ambergrise any one takes up here, is by the labour that removes it out
of that common state nature left it in, ma