Arabia,
where those people lived, also shew that there was no landed property.
It was not admitted that land could be claimed as property.

There could be no such thing as landed property originally. Man did not
make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had
no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither
did the creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the
first title-deeds should issue. Whence then, arose the idea of landed
property? I answer as before, that when cultivation began the idea of
landed property began with it, from the impossibility of separating the
improvement made by cultivation from the earth itself, upon which that
improvement was made. The value of the improvement so far exceeded the
value of the natural earth, at that time, as to absorb it; till, in the
end, the common right of all became confounded into the cultivated right
of the individual. But there are, nevertheless, distinct species of
rights, and will continue to be so long as the earth endures.

It is only by tracing things to their origin that we can gain rightful
ideas of them, and it is by gaining such ideas that we discover the
boundary that divides right from wrong, and teaches every man to know
his own. I have entitled this tract Agrarian Justice, to distinguish it
from Agrarian Law. Nothing could be more unjust than Agrarian Law in a
country improved by cultivation; for though every man, as an inhabitant
of the earth, is a joint proprietor of it in its natural state, it
does not follow that he is a joint proprietor of cultivated earth. The
additional value made by cultivation, after the system was admitted,
became the property of those who did it, or who inherited it from them,
or who purchased it. It had originally no owner. Whilst, therefore, I
advocate the right, and interest myself in the hard case of all
those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the
introduction of the system of landed property, I equally defend the
right of the possessor to the part which is his.

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever
made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value.
But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest
evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation
of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought
to have been done, an indemnificatio