pon the subject. In the Primer of Logic I have already attempted
to explain what science is, and I will now attempt to make plain what
wealth is.

Doubtless many people think that there is no difficulty in knowing what
#wealth# is; the real difficulty is to get it. But in this they are
mistaken. There are a great many people in this country who have made
themselves rich, and few or none of them would be able to explain
clearly what wealth is. In fact it is not at all easy to decide the
question. The popular idea is that wealth consists of money, and money
consists of gold and silver; the wealthy man, then, would be one who has
an iron safe full of bags of gold and silver money. But this is far from
being the case; rich men, as a general rule, have very little money in
their possession. Instead of bags of money they keep good balances at
their bankers. But this again does not tell us what wealth is, because
it is difficult to say what a bank balance consists of; the balance is
shown by a few figures in the bankers' books. As a general rule the
banker has not got in his possession the money which he owes to his
customers.

Perhaps some one will say that he is beyond question rich, who owns a
great deal of land. But this depends entirely upon where and what the
land is. A man who owns an English county is very wealthy; a man might
own an equal extent of land in Australia, without being remarkably rich.
The savages of Australia, who held the land before the English took it,
had enormous quantities of land, but they were nevertheless miserably
poor. Thus it is plain that land alone is not wealth.

It may be urged that, in order to form wealth, the land should be
fertile, the soil should be good, the rivers and lakes abounding in
fish, and the forests full of good timber. Under the ground there should
be plenty of coal, iron, copper, reefs of gold, &c. If, in addition to
these, there is a good climate, plenty of sunlight, and enough, but not
too much, water, then the country is certainly rich. It is true that
these things have been called #natural riches#; but I mention them in
order to point out that they are not in themselves wealth. People may
live upon land full of natural riches, as the North American Indians
lived upon the country which now forms the United States; nevertheless
they may be very poor, because they cannot, or they will not labour, in
such a way as #to turn the natural riches into wealth#. On the other