offers it, and without the
intention of the person who receives it to consume it, or to enjoy
it, or apply it to any other use than, in turn, to tender it to
others in discharge of debts or full payment for commodities."

Political economy has many different schools of thought and methods of
classification. Its reasonings are mainly speculative, metaphysical, and
legalistic; its ethics is zoological ethics, based on the zoological
conception of man as an animal. The elements of natural logic and natural
ethics are absent. The sophisticated ideas about the subject of political
economy, bluntly do not correspond to facts. Our primitive forefather in
the jungle would have died from hunger, cold, heat, blood poisoning or the
attacks of wild animals, if he had not used his brain and muscles to take
some stone or a piece of wood to knock down fruit from trees, to kill an
animal, so as to use his hide for clothes and his meat for food, or to
break wood and trees for a shelter and to make some weapons for defense
and hunting.

"In the first stone which he (the savage) flings at the wild
animal he pursues, in the first stick that he seizes to strike
down the fruit which hangs above his reach, we see the
appropriation of one article for the purpose of aiding in the
acquisition of another and thus we discover the origin of
capital." (R. Torrens, _An Essay on the Production of Wealth_.)

Our primitive forefather's first acquaintance with fire was probably
through lightning; he discovered, probably by chance, the possibility of
making fire by rubbing together two pieces of wood and by striking
together two pieces of stone; he established one of the first facts in
technology; he felt the warm effect of fire and also the good effect of
broiling his food by finding some roasted animals in a fire. Thus nature
revealed to him one of its great gifts, the stored-up energy of the sun in
vegetation and its primitive beneficial use. He was already a time-binding
being; evolution had brought him to that level. Being a product of nature,
he was reflecting those natural laws that belong to his class of life; he
had ceased to be static--he had become dynamic--progressiveness had got into
his blood--he was above the estate of animals.

We also observe that primitive man produced commodities, acquired
experiences, made observations, and that some of the produced commodities
had a use-value for other peo