#19. Capital.# In order that we may produce much wealth, we require something further, namely, the #capital#, which supports labourers while they are engaged in their work. Men must have food once a day, not to say two or three times; if then they have no stock of food on hand, they must go at once and get it in the best way they can, for fear of starving. They must grub up roots, or gather grass seeds, or catch wild animals--if they can. When working in this way, they usually spend a great deal of labour for very little result; Australian natives sometimes have to cut down a large tree with stone axes, which is very hard work, in order to catch an opossum or two. Men who live in this way from hand to mouth have no time nor strength to make arrangements so as to get food and clothes in the easiest way. It requires much labour to plough the ground, to harrow it, and sow it with corn, besides fencing it in; when all this is done it is requisite to wait six months before the crop can be gathered. Certainly, the amount of food thus obtained is large compared with the labour: but wild Indians and other ignorant tribes of men cannot wait while the corn is growing; the poor Australian natives have to gather grass seeds or find worms and opossums every day.
There is a good Japanese maxim which says, "Dig a well before you are thirsty," and it is evidently very desirable to do so. But you must have capital to live upon while you are digging the well. In the same way, almost every mode of getting wealth without extreme labour requires that we shall have a stock of food to subsist upon while we are working and waiting, and #this stock is called capital#. In the absence of capital people find themselves continually in difficulties, and in danger of starvation. In the first of her tales on political economy, called "Life in the Wilds," Miss Martineau has beautifully described the position of settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, who are imagined to have been attacked by Bushmen and robbed of their stock of capital. She shows us how difficult it is to get any food or to do any useful work, because something else is wanted beforehand--some tool, or material, or at any rate time to make it. But there is no time to make anything, because all attention has to be given to finding shelter for the night, and something for supper. Everybody who wishes to understand the necessity for capital, and the way capital serves us, should read this tale of Miss Martineau, and then go on to her other tales about Political Economy.