its importance; he can bring
the productive forces of Nature into service, and make them produce
food, clothing, and shelter. How has the change been brought about? The
answer is, By capital. If we can come to an understanding of what
capital is, and what a place it occupies in civilization, it will clear
up our ideas about a great many of these schemes and philosophies which
are put forward to criticise social arrangements, or as a basis of
proposed reforms.

The first beginnings of capital are lost in the obscurity which covers
all the germs of civilization. The more one comes to understand the
case of the primitive man, the more wonderful it seems that man ever
started on the road to civilization. Among the lower animals we find
some inchoate forms of capital, but from them to the lowest forms of
real capital there is a great stride. It does not seem possible that
man could have taken that stride without intelligent reflection, and
everything we know about the primitive man shows us that he did not
reflect. No doubt accident controlled the first steps. They may have
been won and lost again many times. There was one natural element which
man learned to use so early that we cannot find any trace of him when
he had it not--fire. There was one tool-weapon in nature--the flint.
Beyond the man who was so far superior to the brutes that he knew how
to use fire and had the use of flints we cannot go. A man of lower
civilization than that was so like the brutes that, like them, he could
leave no sign of his presence on the earth save his bones.

The man who had a flint no longer need be a prey to a wild animal, but
could make a prey of it. He could get meat food. He who had meat food
could provide his food in such time as to get leisure to improve his
flint tools. He could get skins for clothing, bones for needles,
tendons for thread. He next devised traps and snares by which to take
animals alive. He domesticated them, and lived on their increase. He
made them beasts of draught and burden, and so got the use of a
natural force. He who had beasts of draught and burden could make a
road and trade, and so get the advantage of all soils and all climates.
He could make a boat, and use the winds as force. He now had such
tools, science, and skill that he could till the ground, and make it
give him more food. So from the first step that man made above the
brute the thing which made his civilization possible was capital. Every
ste