people who will put their wealth into a more permanently useful form. Nevertheless, there could be no use in abstaining from all enjoyment in order that we might lay up a store of wealth. Things are not wealth unless they are useful and pleasant to us. If everybody invested his savings in railway shares, we should have so many railways that they could not be all used, and they would become rather a nuisance than a benefit. Similarly, there could be no good in building docks unless there were ships to load in them, nor ships unless there were goods or passengers to convey. It would be equally absurd to make cotton mills if there were already enough to manufacture as much cotton goods as people could consume. Thus we come to see that wealth must be fitted for use and consumption in some way or other. What we have to do is to endeavour to spend our means so as to get the greatest real happiness for ourselves, our relatives, friends, and all other people whom we ought to consider. CHAPTER III. PRODUCTION OF WEALTH. 16. The Requisites of Production. The first thing in industry, as we now see, is to decide what we want; the next thing is to get it, or make it, or, as we shall say, produce it, and we ought obviously to produce it with the least possible labour. To learn how this may be done, we must inquire what is needful for the production of wealth. There are, as is commonly and correctly said, three requisites of production; before we can, in the present state of society, undertake to produce wealth, we must have the three following things: (1) Land, (2) Labour, (3) Capital. In production we bring these things together; we apply labour to the land, and we employ the capital in assisting the labourer with tools, and feeding him while he is engaged on the work. We must now proceed to consider each of the three requisites in succession. 17. Land or Source of Materials. The word production is a very good one; it means drawing forth (Latin, pro, before, and ducere, to draw), and it thus exactly expresses the fact that, when we want to create wealth, we have to go to some piece of land, or to some lake, river, or sea, and draw forth the substance which is to be made into wealth. It does not matter whether the material comes from the surface of the earth, or from mines and quarries sunk into the earth, or from seas and oceans. Our food mostly grows upon the land, as in the case of corn, potatoes, cattle, game, &c.; our clothes are chiefly made of cotton, flax, wool, skins, raised in like manner. Minerals and metals are obtained by sinking pits and mines into the crust of the earth. Rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans are no slight source of wealth: they yield food, oil, whalebone, sealskin, &c. We cannot manufacture any goods unless we have some matter to work upon; to make a pin we must get copper, zinc, and tin out of mines; a ribbon requires the silk and the dye materials; everything that we touch, and use, and eat, and drink, contains substance, so that we must always begin by finding a supply of the right sort of materials. Commonly, too, we want something more than matter; we want force which shall help us to carry and work the raw material. People naturally wish to avoid tiring themselves by labouring with their own arms and legs, and so they make windmills to grind corn, ships to carry goods, steam-engines to pump water and to do all sorts of hard work. From the earth, or, as we say, from Nature, we obtain both the materials of wealth and the force which helps us to turn the materials into wealth. Whatever thus furnishes us with the first requisite of production is called a natural agent, that is, something which acts for us and assists us (Latin, agens, acting). Among natural agents land is by far the most important, because, when supplied with abundant sunlight and moisture, it may be cultivated and made to yield all kinds of crops. Accordingly, economists often speak of land, when their remarks would really apply as well to rocks and rivers. Three-quarters of the whole surface of the globe is covered with seas; but this vast extent of salt water furnishes little wealth, except whales, seals, sea-weed, and a few other kinds of animals and plants. Hence, when we speak of land, we really mean any source of materials—any natural agent, and we may say that land source of materials = natural agent. 18. Labour. Nothing is more plain, however, than that natural agents alone do not make wealth. A man would perish in the most fertile spot if he did not take some trouble in appropriating the things around him. Fruit growing wild on the trees must be plucked before it becomes wealth, and wild game must be caught before it can be cooked and eaten. We must spend a great deal of labour if we wish to have comfortable clothes and houses and regular supplies of food; the proper sorts of materials must be gradually got together, and shaped and manufactured. Thus the amount of wealth which people can obtain depends far more upon their activity and skill in labouring than upon the abundance of materials around them. As already remarked, North America is a very rich land, containing plenty of fine soil, seams of coal, veins of metal, rivers full of fish, and forests of fine timber, everything, in short, needed in the way of materials; yet the American Indians lived in this land for thousands of years in great poverty, because they had not the knowledge and perseverance to enable them to labour properly and produce wealth out of natural agents. Thus we see clearly that skilful and intelligent and regular labour is requisite to the production of wealth. 19. Capital. In order that we may produce much wealth, we require something further, namely, the capital, which supports labourers while they are engaged in their work. Men must have food once a day, not to say two or three times; if then they have no stock of food on hand, they must go at once and get it in the best way they can, for fear of starving. They must grub up roots, or gather grass seeds, or catch wild animals-if they can. When working in this way, they usually spend a great deal of labour for very little result; Australian natives sometimes have to cut down a large tree with stone axes, which is very hard work, in order to catch an opossum or two. Men who live in this way from hand to mouth have no time nor strength to make arrangements so as to get food and clothes in the easiest way. It requires much labour to plough the ground, to harrow it, and sow it with corn, besides fencing it in; when all this is done it is requisite to wait six months before the crop can be gathered. Certainly, the amount of food thus obtained is large compared with the labour: but wild Indians and other ignorant tribes of men cannot wait while the corn is growing; the poor Australian natives have to gather grass seeds or find worms and opossums every day. There is a good Japanese maxim which says, "Dig a well before you are thirsty," and it is evidently very desirable to do so. But you must have capital to live upon while you are digging the well. In the same way, almost every mode of getting wealth without extreme labour requires that we shall have a stock of food to subsist upon while we are working and waiting, and this stock is called capital. In the absence of capital people find themselves continually in difficulties, and in danger of starvation. In the first of her tales on political economy, called "Life in the Wilds," Miss Martineau has beautifully described the position of settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, who are imagined to have been attacked by Bushmen and robbed of their stock of capital. She shows us how difficult it is to get any food or to do any useful work, because something else is wanted beforehandsome tool, or material, or at any rate time to make it. But there is no time to make anything, because all attention has to be given to finding shelter for the night, and something for supper. Everybody who wishes to understand the necessity for capital, and the way capital serves us, should read this tale of Miss Martineau, and then go on to her other tales about Political Economy We can hardly say that capital is as requisite to production as land and labour, for the reason that capital must have been the produce of land and labour. There must always, indeed, be a little capital in possession, even though it be only the last meal in the stomach, before we can produce more. But there is no good attempting to say exactly how capital began to be collected, because it began in the childhood of the world, when men and women lived more like wild animals than as we live now. Certain it is that we cannot have loaves of bread, and knives and forks, and keep ourselves warm with clothes and brick houses, unless we have a stock of capital to live upon while we are making all these things. Capital is requisite, then, not so much that we shall labour, but that we shall labour economically and with great success. We may call it a secondary requisite, and it would be best to state the requisites of production in this way— Primary requisites......natural agent. labour. Secondary requisite.......capital. 20. How to make Labour most Productive. The great object must be to make labour as productive |