nd growing ripe
with the harvests."[187]

The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in
this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the
philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the
human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was
suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It
is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and
invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions
to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano
which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land
being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of
property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The
first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying,
_This is mine_, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the
real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries,
and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who,
plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out
to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if
you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for
all."[188]

Things might have remained equal even in this state, if talents had only
been equal, and if for example the employment of iron and the
consumption of agricultural produce had always exactly balanced one
another. But the stronger did more work; the cleverer got more advantage
from his work; the more ingenious found means of shortening his labour;
the husbandman had more need of metal, or the smith more need of grain;
and while working equally, one got much gain, and the other could
scarcely live. This distinction between Have and Have-not led to
confusion and revolt, to brigandage on the one side and constant
insecurity on the other.

Hence disorders of a violent and interminable kind, which gave rise to
the most deeply designed project that ever entered the human mind. This
was to employ in favour of property the strength of the very persons who
attacked it, to inspire them with other maxims, and to give them other
institutions which should be as favourable to property as natural law
had been contrary to it. The man who conceived this project, after
showing his neighbours the monstrous confusion which made their liv