the direct production of those things called wealth into a standard, and have divided labourers into productive and unproductive, according as they belong to this standard or not.. Mr Fawcett, following Mr Mill, writes: "It will be found, as observed by Mr Mill, that labour creates utilities fixed and embodied in material objects." In Mr Mill's own words: "Labour is creative of utilities as productive labour is labour productive of wealth." Now wealth is nothing else but an instrument, a tool to effect something, a mere machine. Bread is wealth, but it is only an instrument for producing an effect on the body, for sustaining life. So a beautiful garden, a splendid building, or a fine hunter; they are machines or contrivances for creating effects on the eye or the feelings. They are instruments, not the final results aimed at; they are, in the strictest sense, utilities, On the other hand, pleasures, gratifications which only exist whilst being enjoyed, and services which give satisfaction only whilst being performed, are not wealth; they are the ends, the objects, which the wealth was procured to obtain. Mr Mill, therefore, limits the expression productive to a labourer who makes an instrument, a machine which can impart a pleasure or satisfy a desire. It must be material and susceptible of accumulation. The labour which uses the instrument, and accomplishes the end designed,-the pleasure or the satisfaction of a want-is for him unproductive.

But he is willing to regard labourers who impart qualities to human beings which render them capable of performing services to others or to themselves as productive. The schoolmaster, the physician, the

teachers of bodily exercises, the trainers who develope skill in others, he is willing to regard as productive. The persons whom they instruct are considered to be wealth; they are tools or instruments possessing utility by virtue of the qualities developed and embodied in them by the teachers. The teachers create tools, those tools being men the skilled men are reckoned as wealth. But those who render directly the service for which the wealth was made, Mr Mill classes as unproductive. The judge, the policeman, the army and navy, the civil and governmental service, except so far as they improve the national mind, and so create an improved instrument for producing wealth, are consequently unproductive.

This classification, it must be said, is arbitrary, artificial, and useless. Why the maker of a flute should be called a productive labourer, but the man who plays upon it unproductive, is inconceivable upon any sound principle. They both equally work for the same common purpose to give a pleasure to the ears. They may both labour equally hard, the result is common to both; and why the use of the lips and fingers in playing may not be regarded as instrumental as the making of the flute it is quite impossible to imagine. But why should an instrument, a substance of material wealth, be taken into account at all? Why is not the beautiful singer as truly a productive labourer as the flutemaker ? What has the use or non-use of a piece of wealth called an instrument to do with the matter? The effect of the sound on the ear is the one and the same end aimed at by both processes. To this Mr Mill replies, that the distinction is important only as classifi cation; and that it is desirable to distinguish as a sepa

have been stagnant, mills would not have worked at half time, railway traffics and dividends would not have dwindled down, and commercial bills been hard to find in the money market. So simple a truth as this that the trade of a nation is the exchange of all its goods, and depends for magnitude on the quantity of those goods, is the natural and real, but much unthought of explainer of all these collapses.

Allusion has been made above to the difference of the effects produced on the price of luxuries and of necessaries by a deficiency of supply. Dearer luxuries are given up by many, and thus the rise of value encounters great and increasing resistance. But bread must be bought, whatever its price. Buyers on a bad supply become eager; sellers hold back. The result is a rise of price greatly out of proportion with the amount of the deficiency. A very interesting table has been drawn up by Dr Davenant, and cited by Professor Jevons, founded on conclusions drawn by George King in 1696, in which an estimate is given of the effect on price of different amounts of defect in the supply of

corn.

We take it, he remarks, that a defect in the harvest may raise the price of corn in the following proportions:

so that when corn rises to treble the common rate, it

may be presumed that we want above one-third of the common produce. If we should want five-tenths or half the common produce, the price would rise to near five times the common rate.

Whether this estimate is accurate has been a matter of dispute, but the important fact is not doubted that price ascends far faster than supply falls short.

The sufferings caused by such violent rises of price were fearfully aggravated by the folly of human legislation. The obvious resource against the uncertainties of the seasons was plainly to extend, as widely as possible, the area from which supplies might be regularly drawn. The broader the fields, and the more diverse the climates, from which a people derives its means of existence, incomparably the greater will be their security against starvation, as also against the social and political disorders to which famine so easily leads. But legislators ruled it otherwise.

Artificial contraction of the supply of food would have been bad enough for a people, who in ordinary seasons could protect themselves from want, but applied to a country which at all times could not raise sufficient food for its inhabitants, was the very climax of perverseness. Duties were imposed on corn, not for the sake of obtaining revenue, but avowedly with the object of impeding importation. Nor was this all. The method adopted reached the acme of absurdity. A prohibitory duty was laid on corn, but as the consciousness could not be escaped, that a season might come when starvation would be at hand, it was enacted that if the price reached a certain figure, the ports should be opened and all duty removed. Thus

CHAPTER IV.

CAPITAL.

We have seen that cost of production is composed of all the compensations given for services rendered to consumers, that is for providing materials and with them making the commodities which they require and purchase. Amongst these elements of cost, wages and profits occupy prominent places. We are thus brought to inquiring into the nature of production and the instruments by which it is accomplished.

The

Producing or making is achieved by the use of man's faculties, bodily and mental; that is by labour. To make or, more broadly, to perform a service, is to labour; and this is an act of exertion of human powers. In every case there must be an effort of body. thought of the captain who directs the movements of the man at the wheel cannot be communicated without moving his lips or his hands. The inventor who muitiplies wealth by his genius must speak or write. But mind is seldom if, indeed, it is ever absent, even in the performance of mechanical motions; and it plays an enormous part in the productiveness of the labourer. Man both possesses in himself, and is surrounded by a physical world full of endless capabilities of yielding useful results, that is, results which gratify desire. The intelligence which guides labour, from the knowledge