re industry than is
supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Nevertheless, it is
often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have
their wants supplied, not by the produce of present labour, but of past,
and it long continued to be believed that laws and governments, without
creating capital, could create industry.

All capital is the result of saving. Somebody must have produced it, and
forborne to consume it, or it is the result of an excess of production
over consumption. Although saved, and the result of saving, it is
nevertheless consumed--exchanged partly for tools which are worn out by
use, partly for materials destroyed in the using, and by consumption of
the ultimate product; and, finally, paid in wages to productive
labourers who consume it for their daily wants. The greater part, in
value, of the wealth now existing in England has been produced by human
hands within the last twelve months. A very small proportion, indeed,
was in existence ten years ago. The land subsists, and is almost the
only thing that subsists. Capital is kept in existence, not by
preservation, but by perpetual reproduction.

_II.--The Distribution of Wealth_

The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the
character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary
about them. It is not so with the distribution of wealth. That is a
matter of human institution solely.

Among the different modes of distributing the produce of land and labour
which have been adopted, attention is first claimed by the primary
institution on which the economical arrangements of society have always
rested--private property.

The institution of property consists in the recognition, in each person,
of a right to the exclusive disposal of the fruits of their own labour
and abstinence, and implies the right of the possessor of the fruits of
previous labour to what has been produced by others by the co-operation
between present labour and those fruits of past labour--that is, the
freedom of acquiring by contract.

We now proceed to the hypothesis of a threefold division of the produce,
among labourers, landlords, and capitalists, beginning with the subject
of wages.

Wages depend mainly upon the demand and supply of labour, or, roughly,
on the proportion between population and capital. It is a common saying
that wages are high when trade is good. Capital which was lying idle is
brought into comple