Locke's Theory of Property and Labor

Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise, "Of Property," addresses a problem Locke saw as urgent: if, as both scripture and reason suggest, God gave the earth to mankind in common, how can any individual come to have a private property right in any part of it without the express consent of every other person alive — a condition Locke regarded as practically impossible to obtain? His answer begins from the premise that every man has a property in his own person, to which nobody but himself has any right; the labor of his body and the work of his hands are, therefore, properly his own. Whenever a person removes something out of the state that nature provided and left it in, and mixes his labor with it, joining to it something that is his own, he thereby makes it his property (§27) — Locke's famous illustration being the acorns gathered or the apples plucked from a wild tree, which become the gatherer's own the moment his labor has appropriated them from the common state.