25. God , as King David says (Psalms cxv.16), has given the earth to the children of men—given it to mankind in common. This is clear, whether we consider •natural reason, which tells us that men, once they are born, have a right to survive and thus a right to food and drink and such other things as nature provides for their subsistence, or •revelation, which gives us an account of the grants that God made of the world
to Adam and to Noah and his sons. Some people think that this creates a great difficulty about how anyone should ever come to own anything. I might answer ·that difficulty with another difficulty, saying· that if the supposition that
God gave the world to Adam and his posterity in
common
makes it hard to see how •there can be any individual
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