Indeed, we soon come to estimate any object of wealth according to its power, directly or indirectly, to meet the first want that comes. A cherished memento of friendship may be ever so gratifying, and yet find no place in our account of wealth, because it can serve no purpose in meeting other wants.
Any object of wealth may cease to be counted, not because it has changed, but because wants have changed. The last year's bonnet goes for a song, because the fashion changes; the reaper rots behind the barn or at the roadside, because the harvester is wanted in its place. So the wealth in any object is limited by its relation to the present or prospective wants of its owner, and his control to meet these wants. The wealth of any community is its store of material objects suited to the current wants or fitted to exchange with other communities for more suitable articles of use. We estimate it only by thinking of uses in producing pleasure or preventing pain, its limitations in quantity to a certain range of wants, and its control for use or transfer by an owner.
_Wealth distinguished from power._--Wealth is not to be confused with power of other kinds. Power may be for future exertion; wealth is the result of exertion. Power may take any form of welfare,--health, wisdom, character, as well as wealth. So no personal abilities can be counted as wealth, however useful they may be as means of gaining it. Jenny Lind's abilities as a singer may have been better than wealth; but exertion of those abilities in the United States enabled her to carry back to Europe wealth of which she had none before coming. The ingenuity of Elias Howe exerted upon the sewing machine has been an immense source of wealth and welfare to the world, but it alone could not secure him daily food. Your words and my music combined in a song fit to tickle the fancy of the multitude may transfer wealth to our pockets, but it was in neither the words nor the music, nor yet in the song, and still less in the power to contrive them. If wealth in material things had not been in possession of the multitude, the same sweet sounds might have given satisfaction to the crowds without an idea of wealth in the transaction. Much of the welfare of the world is from exertion of powers entirely independent of wealth. The chief joys of home are not measured by the wealth in our tenement. The chief welfare of society is only incidentally connected with wealth.