p of capital won made the next step possible, up to the present
hour. Not a step has been or can be made without capital. It is labor
accumulated, multiplied into itself--raised to a higher power, as the
mathematicians say. The locomotive is only possible today because, from
the flint-knife up, one achievement has been multiplied into another
through thousands of generations. We cannot now stir a step in our life
without capital. We cannot build a school, a hospital, a church, or
employ a missionary society, without capital, any more than we could
build a palace or a factory without capital. We have ourselves, and we
have the earth; the thing which limits what we can do is the third
requisite--capital. Capital is force, human energy stored or
accumulated, and very few people ever come to appreciate its importance
to civilized life. We get so used to it that we do not see its use.

The industrial organization of society has undergone a development with
the development of capital. Nothing has ever made men spread over the
earth and develop the arts but necessity--that is, the need of getting
a living, and the hardships endured in trying to meet that need. The
human race has had to pay with its blood at every step. It has had to
buy its experience. The thing which has kept up the necessity of more
migration or more power over Nature has been increase of population.
Where population has become chronically excessive, and where the
population has succumbed and sunk, instead of developing energy enough
for a new advance, there races have degenerated and settled into
permanent barbarism. They have lost the power to rise again, and have
made no inventions. Where life has been so easy and ample that it cost
no effort, few improvements have been made. It is in the middle range,
with enough social pressure to make energy needful, and not enough
social pressure to produce despair, that the most progress has been
made.

At first all labor was forced. Men forced it on women, who were drudges
and slaves. Men reserved for themselves only the work of hunting or
war. Strange and often horrible shadows of all the old primitive
barbarism are now to be found in the slums of great cities, and in the
lowest groups of men, in the midst of civilized nations. Men impose
labor on women in some such groups today. Through various grades of
slavery, serfdom, villeinage, and through various organizations of
castes and guilds, the industrial organizat