COLLECTIVISM AND LAND NATIONALIZATION. 247 
intelligent and free agent. In opposition to the physical 
order, where necessity reigns supreme, there is a moral order, 
an order of justice and freedom. 
As man is a responsible agent, his every action must in 
fallibly and inevitably be rewarded or punished according as 
it does or does not conform to the rules imposed by his con 
science ; and this sanction, in order to be inevitable, must take 
place in a subsequent existence. 
The aggregate of indisputable reasonings constitutes “ im 
personal reason,” which, when looked upon as prescribing 
a rule of action, may be called “ sovereignty.” 
From the “ immateriality of the sensibility ” flow, according 
to Colins, other consequences touching man’s relations to the 
material world, that is to say, touching his social economy. 
Man alone, he says, works ; man alone is an agent, properly so 
Called. The material world is the patient on which man acts 
with the aim of producing something. Originally there existed 
only man and the earth on which he lived : on the one hand, 
labour ; and on the other, the soil or raw material, without 
which all labour would be impossible. But from the joint 
action of these two elements of production there soon came 
into being wealth of a peculiar kind, in which labour was, as it 
were, accumulated, which was movable and separate from the 
soil. This was capital. It assists production and is the hand 
maid of labour, but in order to make use of it, a material to 
which it can be applied is indispensable. From the necessity 
to which man is subject for a material on which to expend his 
labour, there results, according to Colins, the following impor 
tant consequence : Labour is free when the raw material, the 
soil, belongs to it ; otherwise it is enslaved. Man therefore 
can, in fact, only exercise his energy with the permission of the 
owners of the raw material j and he who requires the authority 
of another before he can act is clearly not free. In order, then, 
that all the members of the community should become per 
manent proprietors of the national soil, the soil must be 
collectively appropriated. 
The collective appropriation of the soil implies, in the first 
place, that it should be at the disposal of all who wish to