5 o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



comes wealth by certain processes similar to those by which movable 

 substances become wealth. 



But labor alone does not create wealth. Three things are neces- 

 sary for the production or creation of material wealth : first, a natural 

 product ; second, the labor that fashions or utilizes it ; third, demand* 

 Unless there is demand, unless the product that labor has brought into 

 the market meets some want or gratifies some desire, the labor has 

 gone for nothing. Hence it is not true that labor alone creates wealth. 

 Nor does labor determine the measure of wealth. Whether I shall be 

 well paid or ill paid for my labor depends upon its estimation in the 

 market. I may labor many months in producing an article that can 

 not be exchanged — that is, that does not sell ; another man may labor 

 no longer on something else that comes immediately into such demand 

 that the maker thereof is enriched by it. Labor is always an indis- 

 pensable factor in the production of wealth, but it is clear that it is 

 not the sole factor. 



That land is not wealth as it comes from the hands of Nature, but 

 becomes wealth by human connection with it, is evident from the fact 

 that wild land, when remote from civilized centers, has no price what- 

 ever. You can purchase in many parts of the world land enough for 

 a kingdom at the price of a song ; you can in some places appropriate 

 a kingdom, if a wilderness makes a kingdom, by simply calling it your 

 own. You can purchase land in Mexico for ten cents an acre, and it 

 would not command even this almost nominal price were it not wanted 

 for cattle-rearing. When we buy or sell land, the price paid is not 

 for a mere stretch of earth, but either for improvements or conditions, 

 for something given to the land by the efforts of man, or for some- 

 thing that has been developed in connection with the land as a con- 

 sequence of man's relation to it. Conditions make the wealth that 

 pertains to land, and it is always conditions that we buy and sell. 

 And we do not always pay for or obtain the price in labor and capital 

 that the conditions absolutely cost. Many pieces of cultivated land, 

 not near the great towns, can be purchased at a price that is probably 

 less than it cost to clear them, fence them, drain them, break up the 

 sod, plant orchards upon them, and construct roads that lead to them. 

 We talk about buying land just as we talk about buying coal, lumber, 

 fish, minerals, grain, etc., Avhen in all cases we buy labor, conditions, 

 or rights, the land or the substances themselves being free from the 

 hand of Nature. What is the price of coal in the mine, of lumber in 

 the distant forest, of fish in the sea, of metals buried a thousand feet 

 deep in the hills, of the phosphorus and other elements that combine 

 to make us wheat and corn ? Nothing. Coal in a mine situated for 

 working or transportation a little more favorably than coal in other 



* There area few kinds of wealth that do not proceed from a natural product, such 

 as patcnt-righl , copyrights, and productions in art. Maclcod makes demand or exchange- 

 ability the sole test of wealth. 



