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 beforehand—some 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—

20. How to make Labour most Productive. The great object must be to make labour as productive as possible, that is, to get as much wealth as we can with a reasonable amount of labour. In order to do this we must take care to labour in the most favourable way, and there is no difficulty in seeing that we ought to labour

(1) At the best time;
(2) At the best place;
(3) In the best manner.

21. Work at the best Time. Of course we ought to do things when it is most easy to do them, and when we are likely to get most produce for our labour. The angler goes to the river in the early morning or the evening, when the fish will bite; the farmer makes hay while the sun shines; the miller grinds corn when the breeze is fresh, or the stream full; and the skipper starts when wind and tide are in his favour. By long experience farmers have found out the best time of year for doing every kind of work: seed is sown in autumn or spring; manure is carried in winter when the ground is frozen; hedges and ditches are mended when there is nothing else to do, and the harvest is gathered just when it is ripe, and the weather is fine. Norwegian peasants work hard all day in July and August to cut as much grass, and make as much hay as possible. They never think of timber then, because they know that there will be plenty of time during the long winter to cut down trees; and when the snow fills up all the hollows in the mountain side, they can easily drag the trees down to the rivers, which rise high with floods after the melting of the snow, and carry the logs away, without further labour, to the towns and ports. It is a good rule not to do to-day what we can probably do more easily to-morrow: but it is a still better rule not to put off till to-morrow what we can do more easily to-day. In order, however, that we may be able to wait and to do each kind of work at the best time, we must have enough capital to live upon in the meantime.

22. Work at the Best Place. Again, we should carry on every kind of work at the place best suited for it, that we can get possession of. In many cases this is so obvious that the remark seems absurd. Does any one plant fruit trees on the sea sands, or sow corn among rocks? Of course not, because there would be no result. No one is so foolish as to spend his labour in a place where it would be wasted altogether. In other cases it is a question of degree; there may be some produce here, but there would be more produce there. In the south of England vines can be made to grow in the open air, and, in former days, wine used to be made from grapes grown in England. But vines grow much better on the sunny hills of France, Spain, and Germany, and the wine which can there be made with the same labour is far more plentiful and immensely better in quality. Those, then, who want to make wine had much better remove to the continent, or, still better, let the French, Spaniards, and Germans produce wine for us. In England we have good soil and a moist climate fitted for growing grass, and the best thing which our farmers can do is to raise cattle and produce plenty of milk, butter, and cheese.

In order that the world may grow as rich as possible, each country should give its attention to producing what it can produce most easily in its present circumstances, getting other things in exchange by foreign trade. The United States can raise endless quantities of cotton, corn, bacon, meat, fruit, petroleum, besides plenty of gold, silver, copper, iron, &c. Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa will furnish much wool, hides, sugar, preserved meats, besides gold, copper, and diamonds. Tropical Africa has palm oil, ivory, teak wood, gum, &c. South America abounds in cattle from which we get tallow, hides, bones, horns, essence of beef, &c. China supplies us with vast quantities of tea, in addition to silk, ginger, and many minor commodities. India sends cotton, indigo, jute, rice, seeds, sugar, spices, and all kinds of other products. Every part of the world has some commodities which it can produce better than other countries, and if men and governments were wise, they would allow trade to be as free as possible, in order that each thing shall be produced where it costs the least labour to produce it.

23. Work in the Best Manner. Whatever the kind of industry carried on in a place, we ought to take care, thirdly, that each labourer works in the best manner, so as not to waste his labour or to make mistakes. There are many different ways of setting about the same work, and, in order that he may choose the best, the labourer must be intelligent and skilful, or else he must be directed by some person who has knowledge and skill. Moreover, there must be, as we shall see, great division of labour, so that each man shall do the kind of work he can do best. We need, then—

(1) Science,
(2) Division of labour.

24. The Need of Science. In order that he may employ his labour to the best advantage, it is requisite that the labourer should be not merely skilful, that is, clever, and practised in handiwork, but that he should also be guided by a scientific knowledge of the things with which he is dealing. Knowledge of nature consists, to a great extent, in understanding the causes of things, that is, in knowing what things must be put together in order that certain other things shall be produced. Thus the steam-engine is due to the discovery that if heat be applied to water, the result is steam expanding with much force, so that a firebox, coal, boiler, and water are causes of force. Whenever we want to do any work, then, we must begin by learning, if possible, what are the causes which will produce it most easily and abundantly. By knowledge we shall often be saved from much needless labour.

As Sir John Herschel has explained, science sometimes shows us that things which we wish to do are really impossible, as, for instance, to invent a perpetual motion, that is, a machine which moves itself. At other times science teaches us that the way in which we are trying to make something is altogether the wrong way. Thus, iron-masters used to think that the best way of smelting iron in the blast-furnace was to blow the furnace with cold air; science, however, showed that, instead of being cold, the air sent into the furnace should be made as hot as possible. Then, again, science often enables us to do our work with a great saving of labour. The boatman or bargeman takes care to learn the state of the tide, so that he may have the tide in his favour in making any journey. Meteorologists have now prepared maps of the oceans showing the sea-captain where he will find winds and currents most favourable to a rapid voyage. Lastly, science sometimes leads us to discover wonderful things which we should not have otherwise thought it possible to do; it is sufficient to mention the discovery of photography and the invention of the telegraph and the telephone. No doubt it may be said that all the greatest improvements in industry—most of what tends to raise man above the condition of the brute animals—proceed from science. The poet Virgil was right when he said, "Happy is he who knows the causes of things."