§. 27. He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the
apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them
to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did
they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or
when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And it is plain, if the
first gathering 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 anybody. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common
state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.
