It has been by labor, that every article has been procured. If nobody had ever done any labor, there would have been no houses, no cultivated fields, no bread to eat, no clothes to wear, no books to read, and the whole world would have been in a poor and wild state, not fit for human beings to live happily in. Men possess all things in consequence of some person having wrought for these things. If a boy get a piece of clay, and make the clay into a small ball or marble to play with, then he has labored or wrought for it, and no other boy has any right to take it from him. The marble is the property of the boy who made it.
Some boys are fond of keeping rabbits.
And if the bad boy still would take the rabbits, then the owner would go to a magistrate, and tell him of the bad boy's conduct, and the bad boy would be punished. All things are the property of some persons, and these persons claim their property in the same way that the boy claims the marble that he has made, or the rabbits that he has reared. If he knew that things would be taken from him, then he would not work much, and perhaps not at all. He would spend many of his days in idleness, and live very poorly. Some boys think, that, because they find things that are lost, they may keep these things to themselves.