The reader will comprehend that I give to this word a more extended sense. I understand by labour the application of our faculties to the satisfaction of our wants. Wants, efforts, satisfactions, this is the circle of Political Economy. Effort may be physical, intellectual, or even moral, as we shall immediately see.
It is not necessary to demonstrate in this place that all our organs, all or nearly all our faculties, may concur, and, in point of fact, do concur, in production. Attention, sagacity, intelligence, imagination, have assuredly their part in it.
M. Dunoyer, in his excellent work, Sur la Liberté du Travail, has included, and with scientific exactness, our moral faculties among the elements to which we are indebted for our wealth—an idea as original and suggestive as it is just. It is destined to enlarge and ennoble the field of Political Economy.
I shall not dwell here upon that idea farther than as it may enable me to throw a faint light upon the origin of a powerful agent of production, of which I shall have occasion to speak hereafter—I mean Capital.
If we examine in succession the material objects which contribute to the satisfaction of our wants, we shall discover without difficulty that all or nearly all require, in order to their being brought to perfection, more time, a larger portion of our life, than a man can expend without recruiting his strength, that is to say, without satisfying his wants. This supposes that those who had made those things had previously reserved, set aside, accumulated, provisions, to enable them to subsist during the operation. [p093]
The same observation applies to satisfactions which have nothing material belonging to them.
A clergyman cannot devote himself to preaching, a professor to teaching, a magistrate to the maintenance of order, unless, by themselves, or by others, they are put in possession of means of subsistence previously created.
Let us go a little higher. Suppose a man isolated and forced to live by the chase. It is easy to comprehend that if every night he consumed the whole game which his day’s hunting had furnished, he could never set himself to any other work, to build a cottage, for example, or repair his arms or implements. All progress would be interdicted in his case.
This is not the proper place to define the nature and functions of Capital. My sole object at present is to show that certain moral virtues co-operate very directly in the amelioration of our condition, even when viewed exclusively with reference to wealth,—among other virtues, order, foresight, self-control, economy.
To foresee is one of our noblest privileges, and it is scarcely necessary to say that, in all situations of life, the man who most clearly foresees the probable consequences of his acts and determinations has the best chance of success.