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of each of the three is essential to the highest well-being of the whole body politic.

§ 32. In seeking the full and free development of the national life on all its sides as its chief end, the state cannot be charged with selfishness. The affections and the attachments of finite beings are of necessity circumscribed, that they may be intense, vigorous and healthy. In the family life we should count the man immoral who loved other men's wives as he loved his own; unnatural if he had no more affection for his own children than for those of other men. To" provide for his own, especially for them that are of his own house," is one of the first duties of the head or the member of a nation as well as of a household.

While acting first of all for the interest of his own nation, he is not bound to seek to injure or cramp the natural development of other nations. He can quite consistently cherish the warmest desires for the welfare of every other national household, and scrupulously avoid any act that would interfere. with it. The more strong and hearty and pure the attachment he feels towards his own nation, the more likely he is to sympathize with the patriotic citizens of other nations. The late F. D. Maurice well says: "If I being an Englishman desire to be thoroughly an Englishman, I must respect every Frenchman who desires to be thoroughly a Frenchman, every German who strives to be thoroughly a German. I must learn more of the grandeur and worth of his position, the more I estimate the worth and grandeur of my own. Parting with our distinctive characteristics, we become useless to each other,—we run in each other's way; neither brings in his quota to the common treasure of humanity."

Those who cherish the enthusiasm that men feel for their own nation, as ethically right, do not necessarily repudiate "the enthusiasm of humanity." They may very well recognise its value and dignity, while feeling that it belongs to another sphere than either the jural or industrial state. There is another kingdom, "not of this world" or order, in which "there is neither Jew nor Greek," founded by him who awakened the sense of human brotherhood in the hearts of men.

§ 33. The industrial state contains three great fundamental classes, the agricultural, the commercial and the manufacturing. A nation takes high rank industrially in proportion as all the three are fully developed and exist in equilibrium. If any one of the three is depressed or hindered in its development, the whole body politic suffers accordingly. The others may seem to prosper at its expense, but because the state is a living organism and not a dead aggregate of individuals, one member cannot suffer, but all the members must suffer with it.

§ 34. The individuality of the parts of an organism has its end in their interdependence and mutual helpfulness. A flock of animals, though "a collection of individuals," is not a whole made up of differentiated parts. It is only "a numerical extension of a single specimen." A mob of men is equally deficient in true organic unity. It is united only by the existence of the same overmastering rage or lawlessness in each single individual, as animates the entire mob. A state is a body in which men have different functions as well as different personalities; in which each has his place of service to the whole body. The greater and more marked the variety of the parts, the more closely the whole body is bound in an effective unity. The nation takes a low rank industrially whose members are not employed chiefly in serving one another, but in serving the members of other nationalities.

§ 35. All history illustrates the principle that the chief growth of the state is from within. Nations have often imparted to each other wholesome and stimulating impulses, but beyond a certain limit foreign influence has always been a hindrance, and has been jealously resented by the wise instincts of the people. We see this in the history of art, literature, language, law and political institutions, and every other side of the national life.

Any plan of human life, any project for human improvement, which, either in the interest of imperial ambition or of cosmopolitan philanthropy, ignores the existence of the nations as parts of the world's providential order, can work only mischief and confusion.

CHAPTER THIRD.

WEALTH AND NATURE.

§ 36. WE are engaged in "an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations." The word wealth is used in two senses; as meaning either the aggregate of possessions that minister to man's necessities and tastes, or the possession of an abundance of such objects. In the former or popular sense wealth is the measure of man's power over nature; in the latter or scientific sense it is the power itself developed to more than the average degree.

Closely connected with the term wealth is the term value. The one is the antithesis of the other. If wealth is the measure of man's power over nature, value is the measure of nature's power over man,―of the resistance that she offers to his efforts to master her. Some of the natural substances are to be had everywhere, always and in the form needed for man's consumption. These have no value, though the very highest utility. Others, such as the water for the supply of a great city, need to be changed in place, and have a value proportional to the cost of their transfer. Others need to be changed in form by manufacture as well as changed in place before their use, and have a still higher value. In other instances the resistance takes the form of scarcity, and is therefore in some degree insuperable, and the degree of the value is still higher.

§ 37. Man stands in close relation to nature, as the possessor of a body which forms part of the physical world. He therefore needs the services of nature continually. His body is undergoing incessant decays and renewals. Motion, respiration, sensation, digestion, circulation of the blood, even thought itself wear away its tissues, and unless this waste be replaced the man must die literally of exhaustion.

Furthermore, these vital processes can be carried on only in the presence of a certain amount of animal heat, which must be

supplied from within, and (in most climates) shielded from without to prevent its excessive radiation.

The chemical substances that form the bodily frame are chiefly Oxygen, Hydrogen, Carbon and Nitrogen. The two first in the form of water make 75 per cent. of the whole body, and 83 per cent. of the most ccmmon foods. Berzelius says that the living organism is to be regarded as a mass diffused in water, and another chemist has humorously defined man as fifty pounds of nitrogen and carbon suspended in six buckets-full of

water.

The starch which forms so large an element in the ordinary foods enters into the composition of none of the tissues. It is consumed in the lungs to furnish the vital heat, and breathed off as carbonic acid. § 38. Hence man's two great material necessities are food and clothing. The desires for these furnish the motive to the vastest activities of the race. As his brain expands, indeed, and as society develops, other desires grow into life and become motives to action; but these two are universal. Others are voluntary; these are enforced by the sensations of hunger and cold. Others are directed to comforts or luxuries; these to things necessary and indispensable.

The productions of the three kingdoms of nature do not equally satisfy these desires. Though there are apparent exceptions, it may be laid down as a rule that he obtains food and clothing from the animal and vegetable kingdoms only. The animal kingdom as a whole is supported by the vegetable, which in its turn depends upon the abundance and fitness of the great mixtures of vegetable and mineral substances which we call soil. Only the lowest type of vegetation can support its life upon mineral food alone.

§ 39. We can trace the story of the earth's development back to a period when vegetation, and therefore soil, did not yet exist upon its surface. Some of the natural agents already at work were indeed preparing for the formation of soil. Glacial corrosion and other violent forms of action were grinding masses of rock into fine sand, and the frosts were chipping away the edges and faces of the rocks by sudden expansion of the water that they had absorbed.

Vegetation began with the lichens and the mosses, which

THE HISTORY OF THE SOIL.

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secured a foothold on the surface of the rocks, and slowly crumbled down a few grains of sand from the hard mass (by the action of the oxalic acid which they secrete), and dying, mingled therewith the ashes of their own decay. This furnished the first soil for the next highest order of vegetable life, and thus through successive orders of vegetable life the soil was deepened and enriched.

As illustrating Goethe's law of progress by differentiation of the parts from the whole and from each other (see 30), it is worth while to notice the stages of this development as given in the great classification of Oken. First come the acotyledons (lichens, mosses, &c.), which have neither root nor stem, neither bark nor wood, neither leaves nor seeds. Then the monocotyledons (grasses, lilies and palms), which have no branches nor true leaves, but may have either woody stems, or venous liber, or bark—never the three united. The third are the dicotyledons (fruit and forest trees, &c.), which unite all these parts in one organism. This process of the formation of soil on a rocky surface by successive vegetable growths, still takes place with some modifications in the coral islands of the Pacific. When the coral polyp has raised its rocky fortress above the sea level, the surface is soon strewed with fragments that the waves break off and grind into sand, which is mixed with the remains of the coral polyp. A cocoanut carried safely in its rough husk on a long voyage is washed ashore and takes root. The decay of its leaves forms a new soil, and the birds that rest on its branches bring the seeds of other vegetation in their crops, so that a multifarious growth rapidly covers the barren rock.

§ 40. The sustenance which the growing plant derives from the mineral kingdom is not taken solely nor even mainly from the soil through its roots, but from the air through its leaves. Were it otherwise, the growth of the soil must stop as soon as its depth became as great as that to which the plants thrust down their roots. But six feet of soil is not uncommonly found on the prairies of the West, and even that depth still increasing. The chief food of plants is carbonic acid, one of the elements of the air, which in the early geological ages was so abundant that only vegetable life could have existed on the earth's surface. The