The confident reference to "that original state of
things" is quite in the manner of the Essai sur l'Inegalie. Now, the
state of men before the "appropriation of land" and the "accumulation
of stock" must surely have been that of purely savage hunters. As, by
the supposition, nobody would have possessed land, certainly no man
could have had a landlord; and, if there was no accumulation of stock
in a transferable form, as surely there could be no master, in the
sense of hirer. But hirer and hire (that is, wages) are correlative
terms, like mother and child. As "child" implies "mother," so does
"hire" or "wages" imply a [181] "hirer" or "wage-giver." Therefore,
when a man in "the original state of things" gathered fruit or killed
game for his own sustenance, the fruit or the game could be called his
"wages" only in a figurative sense; as one sees if the term "hire,"
which has a more limited connotation, is substituted for "wage." If
not, it must be assumed that the savage hired himself to get his own
dinner; whereby we are led to the tolerably absurd conclusion that, as
in the "state of nature" he was his own employer, the "master" and the
labourer, in that model age, appropriated the produce in equal shares!
And if this should be not enough, it has already been seen that, in
the hunting state, man is not even an accessory of production of vital
capital; he merely consumes what nature produces.
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