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