All services in the household, in contributing to
bodily comfort of the family, make an essential part of human welfare, but
prudence requires such an adjustment of these services to the total
wealth-producing energy that they may be maintained without reducing the
total power. All public expenditures in the care of streets and parks are
an essential to welfare so long as the sources of wealth production are
kept the more active from such advantages. The test of prudence in all
such adjustment is the increase of power in wealth-production, along with
increasing welfare.

_Provision for future wants._--True prudence is largely foresight, and so
is the enterprise of speculative energy which provides any product for a
future market. No more careful adjustment is necessary than that which
secures such a product of farm or factory as the world will need when it
reaches its actual market. The greatest wisdom is needed in studying the
conditions of a community with reference to its future wants, and the
supply actually accumulating for meeting those wants.

Farmers need, as truly as any producers, to know the wants of the world
for which they are producing food. The crops they plant in the spring will
actually be consumed in large measure during the following year. Prudence
suggests that they plant such crops as will be most in demand. If they
judge by the market today, they are in danger of two errors: first, of
overestimating the future demand, which may be satisfied before the new
crop comes; second, of diverting from ordinary staple crops too large a
portion of the crop-raising force. Common experience has taught that a
high price of hops or onions or broom corn has almost certainly wrought a
reduction of the price for succeeding crops below the normal cost. Still
larger foresight is needed with reference to the raising of live stock,
which requires more than a single season's investment of capital. To stock
a farm with hogs, sheep, cattle or horses, requires from one to five years
of accumulated capital. The record of farm stock shows successive waves of
such production in direct opposition to prudence. (Chart No. 4, p. 83.)

The manufacturing world has similar experiences of imprudent consumption
in the effort to forestall a market. But the record of failures in this
respect is scarcely as marked, because of more business-like collection of
information for the guidance of judgment. Farmers too generally follow the
lead