greater part of the wealth now existing in England has been produced in the last twelve months"! Is it not clear that there is here some great mistake? Out of these £525,000,000 the whole people of Great Britain have had to be fed and clothed; and yet the capital represented by the "savings" of a single year, is counted by almost thousands of millions!

The various parts of the system that leads to such extraordinary results are, throughout, inconsistent with themselves. Land is not to be regarded as wealth, even although the labor applied upon it through a long period of years may have redeemed it from being a sterile waste- bringing it to rank first among the productive soils of the kingdom. When, however, a part of that land becomes turnips, they are wealth; if fed to hogs or oxen, they continue to be wealth. Another part being converted into houses, or steam-engines, that also is wealth. The turnips, however, being converted into men, they cease to be wealth economists, therefore, one and all, uniting in urging upon their countrymen to increase their wealth by converting it into oxen, rather than impoverish themselves by converting it into additional men, women, and children. The man who causes a bushel of potatoes to grow, adds to the wealth of the country; but he who teaches his fellow-men to double the productiveness of their labor by an increase of the power of the steam-engine, does not his labors not taking the material form required for enabling it to come under the head of "abstinence from present consumption for the sake of future good." The child who converts cotton into thread, is a producer of wealth; but the inventor of the railway could no more be placed under that head, than could Fulton, who taught the world how to apply steam to the purposes of navigation; or Morse, who first enabled electricity to do the work of tens of thousands of horses and men. To the services of such men it is chiefly due, that the land of Britain has largely increased in price within the last century-thus rendering its owners generally more wealthy than they before had been; and yet, neither that increase, nor the labors of the men to whom it has been due, come under the category of wealth.

In what, however, does wealth consist? "Everything," says Mr. Mill, is wealth" that is not "gratuitously" supplied by nature air, though "the most absolute of necessaries," not

being wealth, because obtained without effort.* Wealth should therefore, increase with every recession from the point of perfect gratuity, at which air has always stood. It should, too, diminish with every approach towards it — men becoming less wealthy as they are more enabled to economize the labor required for commanding the services of steam, electricity, and gravitation. Were this so, power and wealth would be always moving towards opposite points of the compass. That it is not so, is proved by the fact, that men and nations do increase in wealth, as they grow in power to command the services of heat and steam, on terms similar to those on which they have the use of air; that is to say, "gratuitously." Men's natural instincts leading them in the right direction, they have arrived at the belief, so generally expressed, that "Wealth is Power." The reverse of this, however, must be true, if the Ricardo-Malthusian teachings have any foundation on which to stand wealth there being found growing in company with a constantly increasing necessity for resorting to lands of less and less productive power.

§ 10. The chief difficulty with which social science has had to contend, has been the want of clear and distinct definitions of the terms in use. Mr. Mill, as is here shown, uses wealth and capital as convertible-while totally excluding the most important item of a nation's wealth; yet, he elsewhere says, that "there can be no doubt if capital were forthcoming to execute all known and recognized improvements in the land of the United Kingdom," much benefit would thence result. The question would, however, at once arise, whether, from the moment it had been so applied, it would not, in his view, cease to be either wealth or capital. The exclusion, from under these categories, of all the labor expended on land in the last thousand years, would seem equally to warrant the further exclusion of every expenditure for similar purposes, in all time to come.

The definitions thus far furnished in the present work, being, as it is believed, universally true, should cover the whole ground - removing the difficulties that heretofore have proved an almost insuperable obstacle to a clear understanding of what really was

* Principles of Political Economy, Preliminary Remarks.

meant, by any writer who used the various terms. The whole may now thus be stated:

Utility is the measure of man's power over nature.

Value is that of nature's power over man of the resistance she offers to the gratification of his desires.

Wealth consists in the power of man to command the always gratuitous services of nature.

Production consists in directing those forces to the service of

man.

Capital is the instrument by help of which the work is donewhether existing in the form of land and its improvements, ships, wagons, roads, houses, churches, steam-engines, ploughs, mental development, books, or corn.

Trade consists in the performance of exchanges for other persons being the instrument used by

Commerce, which consists in the exchange of services, products, or ideas, by men, and with their fellow-men.

As the power of association grows, utility increases, and value as steadily declines.

As the value of commodities declines, there is increase in the value of man, with constant development of individuality, and constant increase in the security for the enjoyment of rights of person and of property.

As person and property become more secure, men and capital tend to become more fixed, with constant diminution in the proportion of either remaining in the floating state.

As men and capital tend to become fixed, and as the latent powers of nature tend more and more to be developed, there is an increase in the tendency towards the creation of local centres, and towards the establishment of the same beautiful system which keeps in order the universe of which this earth constitutes a part.

As local centres increase in number and in attraction, the power of association tends steadily to increase-every step in that direction being accompanied by diminution in the necessity for the services of the trader, increase in the power of production, in the growth of capital, and in the rapidity of its circulation-with corresponding increase of commerce.

CHAPTER XL.

OF CIRCULATION.

§ 1. WITH land abounding, our early colonist possessed no wealth having none of that material capital, and little of the mental, required for directing the natural forces to his service. Nature, herself, being strong for resistance to his efforts, and he being weak, he was wholly dependent on her bounty for supplies of food. Monarch of all he surveyed, he was still her slavebeing yet destitute of power resulting from combination with others like himself. The larger his territory, the less, necessarily, was the power of association, and the greater the obstacles to his acquisition of wealth and power.

Discovering, at length, that he has a neighbor, he finds that instead of his wife and himself being its sole occupants, and he, himself, sole proprietor, he owns but half of it- his possessions being thus diminished. Is he, or is his neighbor, poorer than before? On the contrary, both are richer having acquired increase of power, resulting from the ability to combine their efforts for overcoming resistance that, thus far, had proved an overmatch for their divided efforts. Each now profits by the distinctive qualities of the other. One excelling in fishing, and the other in taking birds or rabbits, both are enabled to obtain larger supplies of food.

Their sons growing up, the land is again divided, with large increase of force. Their numbers further increasing, new divisions are required land thus decreasing in its ratio to population, while wealth and power as steadily increase. Consumption now more rapidly following production, individuality becomes more and more developed-with growing power of accumulation.

§ 2. In the early ages of society, land is wholly valueless. Men then hunt and fish their only property consisting of bows

and arrows, skins, and the little food they may have saved in summer, as provision against the wants of winter. Later, we find them in the shepherd state- their flocks being numerous, and constituting their only wealth. Land being still without value, is unhesitatingly abandoned when the pasture becomes exhausted. The community being still but nature's slave, of voluntary circulation there is none each of its members finding. himself compelled to move when others move, and thus producing the extraordinary emigrations recorded in Greek and Roman history.

In this condition of society it is, that centralization most exists the few who are strong of arm, or intellect, then exercising the largest amount of influence over the floating mass of which the community is composed. Poor, and often suffering for want of food, the latter are always ready to follow in the train of men like Brennus or Vercingetorix, Tamerlane or Bajazet, Genghis Khan or Nadir Shah gladly aiding in stopping the circulation of society among others more advanced in wealth and power than themselves.

Later, they seek to obtain, by means of cultivation, increased supplies of food-land then acquiring some slight estimation, and the proportion borne by movable to fixed property, tending slightly towards diminution. Small communities then are seen appropriating land, to be temporarily divided among its occupants, as was the case in Gaul, in the days of Cæsar. So was it, too, in India. So is it now, as the reader has already seen, under the communistic system prevalent in Russia. Communism and semi-barbarism travel thus together giving precisely the system recently urged upon the people of France, by philosophers holding that association and individuality are opposing principles.*

As a rule, however, those possessed of strength of arm have constituted themselves proprietors of extensive tracts of land

That the errors of modern Socialism are but a reproduction of those of French writers of the last century, is shown by M. de Tocqueville (L'Ancien Régime, chap. xv.) — the doctrines of "community of property, rights of labor, absolute equality, universal uniformity, mechanical regularity of individual movements, tyrannical regulations on all subjects, and the total absorption of the individual in the body politic," being as fully exhibited in Morelly's Code de la Nature, as in any of the writings of Proudhon, or Louis, Blanc.