demonstrate it. One conclusion or the other must be hopelessly wrong; and, even at the cost of going once more over some of the ground traversed in this essay and that on "Natural and Political Rights,"* I propose to show that the error lies with "Progress and Poverty"; in which work, so far as political science is concerned, the poverty is, to my eye, much more apparent than the progress.
* Collected Essays, vol. i. pp. 359-382.
To begin at the beginning. The author propounds a definition of wealth: "Nothing which nature supplies to man without his labour is wealth" (p. 28). Wealth consists of "natural substances or products which have been adapted by human labour to human use or gratification, their value depending upon the amount of labour which, upon the average, would be required to produce things of like kind" (p. 27). The following examples of wealth are given:—
. . . "Buildings, cattle, tools, machinery, agricultural and
mineral products, manufactured goods, ships, waggons,
furniture, and the like" (p. 27).
I take it that native metals, coal and brick clay, are "mineral products"; and I quite believe that they are properly termed "wealth." But when a seam of coal crops out at the surface, and lumps of coal are to be had for the picking up; or when native copper lies about in nuggets, or
when brick clay forms a superficial stratum, it appears to me that these things are supplied to, nay almost thrust upon, man without his labour. According to the definition, therefore, they are not "wealth." According to the enumeration, however, they are "wealth": a tolerably fair specimen of a contradiction in terms. Or does "Progress and Poverty" really suggest that a coal seam which crops out at the surface is not wealth; but that if somebody breaks off a piece and carries it away, the bestowal of this amount of labour upon that particular lump makes it wealth; while the rest remains "not wealth"? The notion that the value of a thing bears any necessary relation to the amount of labour (average or otherwise) bestowed upon it, is a fallacy which needs no further refutation than it has already received. The average amount of labour bestowed upon warming-pans confers no value upon them in the eyes of a Gold-Coast negro; nor would an Esquimaux give a slice of blubber for the most elaborate of ice-machines.
So much for the doctrine of "Progress and Poverty" touching the nature of wealth. Let us now consider its teachings respecting capital as wealth or a part of wealth. Adam Smith's definition "that part of a man's stock which he expects to yield him a revenue is called his capital" is quoted with approval (p. 32); elsewhere capital is said to be that part of wealth "which
is devoted to the aid of production" (p. 28); and yet again it is said to be