CHAPTER II

WANTS AND THEIR SUPPLY

SOME of the things that we want, some that are essential to our very existence, are supplied to us without any exertion of our own. For these we have to rely on Nature entirely, and if Nature ceased to supply them, the end of the human race, and indeed of all animal life, would be decisive and immediate. Air, and sunlight, and the warmth of the sun, no man can make, nor could we live without them.

Other things far more numerous though far less essential, we can only obtain as the result of our own exertions, backed, of course, by the natural conditions and facilities with which we are surrounded. Most of our food, all of our clothing, and the shelter that our dwellings afford, come to us as the result of our work, the fruit of the exertion of mind and body whereby we have so adjusted the materials, and employed the forces, of the earth on which we live, that the materials may be adapted to our desires and the forces become the servants of our needs.

Now the former class of things will not occupy our attention to any great extent. Our chief concern will be with those things which we have because they satisfy our wants, but which we cannot get unless we exert ourselves for their procuring.

And if we add up all the things of this latter class existing in a given country at a given time, we shall have an enumeration, complete for that time and place, of its existing Wealth. We thus realise that Wealth and Economic Goods

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two names for the same thing.

are but

For we call a thing a "good" when it satisfies a want of ours, and not on account of its own nature. We must be careful to note the precise meaning of the word " good" when used in this manner. Its meaning is to point to a certain relation between a thing and a man, and not -when so used-to claim for the thing any excellence of quality for itself. A fur coat may be a very good fur coat so far as its qualities as a fur coat are concerned; but such a coat is "no good " to a man living in Calcutta, because in that climate it cannot be brought into the want-satisfying relation to a man. Hence the same thing may be a good to one man, and no good to another, even at the same time and place, simply because the two men have different wants, and the thing in question is capable of ministering to the wants of one of them, but not to the wants of the other.

If then a good is a free gift of Nature it is a Noneconomic Good; and in respect of such goods we are all communists, each of us using, of such goods, as much as he cares to use, nor caring at all how much others have; since in the case of these goods the possessions of others leave none the less for us. But economic goods we store, and buy, and sell.

Whence then do they come, and how do we procure them, for purchase and for sale? We procure them by producing them; and we must now look carefully into the process of " producing

a good, to ascertain exactly in what that process

consists.

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It is now a commonplace of physical scienceone of the things that "every schoolboy knows" -that matter is indestructible, and essentially constant in quantity. "No man," it has been said, "by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature "; and no man by taking thought can add a grain to, or subtract a grain from, the total mass of existing matter. It follows therefore, that in the strict sense of the word, no man can produce anything. There is nothing new under the sun; everything that is called new is but an altered form imposed upon something that has existed throughout all time; "as old as the hills." Man's power over matter is thus limited to arranging it anewpouring old wine into new bottles. And when a man takes a portion of pre-existing matter, and by rearranging it imposes upon it the want-satisfying form, that man is said to have produced a commodity. Here then is the exact nature of the production of a commodity. It is the rearrangement of pre-existing matter, from a form in which it was less, to a form in which it is more, capable of satisfying a human want.

A man is proposing to furnish a house. For some reason he wants to have a dining-table specially made for him. A furniture-making firm Somewhere Somewhere in South

undertakes to do this.

America there stands a mahogany tree. In its present form and position it can satisfy no human want. It is cut down and brought to England in the form of a log. There it is sawn into planks, the planks are cut into lengths, adjusted, and joined. The legs are made by altering, in a lathe,

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another part of the same log. The whole is now put together, finished and polished; and the South American tree has become the British commodity, a dining-table. The commodity is said to be" produced"; but the economic fact is that matter has been altered from the form of a tree, in which it was not, to the form of a table, in which it is, capable of satisfying a human want. The change has been finely described by the late W. M. Thackeray in his poem, 66 The Mahogany Tree "

It would be difficult to quote a statement clearer or more beautifully expressed, of the construction of a commodity by alteration of form.

But in thus showing what man can do, we discover also his limitations. Since man's wants are supplied by the alteration of materials which Nature has supplied, it is vain for man to want things for which Nature has not supplied fitting and appropriate materials. The old legend tells how the devil himself failed to twist a rope of sand. If Nature had not first supplied a fibre, man would have had to go without a rope. On our

earth in the passage of the ages there have existed creatures to whose continued life it was essential to obtain things which Nature would no longer supply, or would not supply in sufficient quantity

for their needs. Such creatures have passed away; we know of them now only by their remains, many of them only as "fossils." They ceased to harmonise with their surroundings; or, in economic terms, they perished because they wanted what they could not get. Man, it is true, is ever finding new ways of adjusting matter to his wants; but he must take matter as he finds it. Beyond that he cannot go. He may invent the flying machine; but he will never soar beyond the atmosphere on wings.

In order, therefore, to produce we must have the things necessary for production. Before we can increase our stock of economic goods we must be willing to work, and the conditions must enable us to work. We must now proceed to enquire what these enabling conditions are.

In the first place we must have Labour-human exertion for a human end. But labour is of many kinds and has many and diverse things to do, as it shares out the different portions of the vast complex of operations which we found to be necessary to the satisfaction of each want as it arises. As we saw in the case of the dining-table, some people work in such a way that when their work is finished the commodity is finished too, and nothing more needs to be done to it to fit it to the wants on behalf of which the whole complex of operations was undertaken. Such are the men who actually shape and polish the table; and these are the direct labourers, so to be described because they minister directly and at once to the human want. Others again, who may be called indirect labourers, labour in order to make the direct labour possible. Some of these made the necessary tools-many