376 NATURAL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS vm 



substances out of which it is constructed, are parts 

 of the material universe, therefore the property of 

 mankind at large. It is very true that your skill 

 and labour have made a wonderful piece of 

 mechanism out of them ; but these are only 

 improvements. Now you are quite entitled to 

 claim the improvements, but you have no right to 

 the gold and the iron these belong to mankind." 

 The watchmaker might reasonably think the 

 task set before him as difficult as that imposed 

 upon Shylock, when he was told that he was 

 entitled to have his pound of flesh, but that he 

 must shed no blood in the cutting it out. He 

 might urge that for all practical purposes the 

 " improvements " are the chronometer, while the 

 gratuitous offering of Nature in the shape of raw 

 material is relatively insignificant. To the ordin- 

 ary mind there seems to be a great deal of sanity 

 in this contention : not so to our political philoso- 

 pher. 



But it will be said : " There are improvements which in time 

 become indistinguishable from the land itself ! " Very well ; 

 then the title to the improvements becomes blended with the 

 title to the land : the individual right is lost in the common 

 right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less 

 that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from 

 man, but man from Nature, and it is unto the bosom of Nature 

 that he and all his works must return again, (p. 243.) 



What answer is appropriate to such stuff as this 

 but Mr. Burchell's famous, if unpolite, monosyl- 

 lable " Fudge " ? 



