Prudence also requires a further adjustment between the amount of labor directly producing wealth and that employed in what may be called the arts of consumption, contributing directly to personal comfort and enjoyment. The neatness of a farmer's yard, outbuildings, fences and machinery is a part of his welfare. It also indicates a certain thrift, which enhances the value of the farm. But it is a proper sign of such thrift when it grows naturally out of the productive energy employed upon the crops and the stock. The wealth used in maintaining this neatness is not wasted, but it will not reproduce itself. It must be supplied from other sources in direct production. All services in the household, in contributing to bodily comfort of the family, make an essential part of human welfare, but prudence requires such an adjustment of these services to the total wealth-producing energy that they may be maintained without reducing the total power. All public expenditures in the care of streets and parks are an essential to welfare so long as the sources of wealth production are kept the more active from such advantages. The test of prudence in all such adjustment is the increase of power in wealth-production, along with increasing welfare.
_Provision for future wants._--True prudence is largely foresight, and so is the enterprise of speculative energy which provides any product for a future market. No more careful adjustment is necessary than that which secures such a product of farm or factory as the world will need when it reaches its actual market. The greatest wisdom is needed in studying the conditions of a community with reference to its future wants, and the supply actually accumulating for meeting those wants.
Farmers need, as truly as any producers, to know the wants of the world for which they are producing food. The crops they plant in the spring will actually be consumed in large measure during the following year. Prudence suggests that they plant such crops as will be most in demand. If they judge by the market today, they are in danger of two errors: first, of overestimating the future demand, which may be satisfied before the new crop comes; second, of diverting from ordinary staple crops too large a portion of the crop-raising force. Common experience has taught that a high price of hops or onions or broom corn has almost certainly wrought a reduction of the price for succeeding crops below the normal cost. Still larger foresight is needed with reference to the raising of live stock, which requires more than a single season's investment of capital. To stock a farm with hogs, sheep, cattle or horses, requires from one to five years of accumulated capital. The record of farm stock shows successive waves of such production in direct opposition to prudence. (Chart No. 4, p. 83.)