Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/528

508 wealth by certain processes similar to those by which movable substances become wealth.

But labor alone does not create wealth. Three things are necessary for the production or creation of material wealth: first, a natural product; second, the labor that fashions or utilizes it; third, demand. Unless there is demand, unless the product that labor has brought into the market meets some want or gratifies some desire, the labor has gone for nothing. Hence it is not true that labor alone creates wealth. Nor does labor determine the measure of wealth. Whether I shall be well paid or ill paid for my labor depends upon its estimation in the market. I may labor many months in producing an article that can not be exchanged—that is, that does not sell; another man may labor no longer on something else that comes immediately into such demand that the maker thereof is enriched by it. Labor is always an indispensable factor in the production of wealth, but it is clear that it is not the sole factor.

That land is not wealth as it comes from the hands of Nature, but becomes wealth by human connection with it, is evident from the fact that wild land, v/hen remote from civilized centers, has no price whatever. You can purchase in many parts of the world land enough for a kingdom at the price of a song; you can in some places appropriate a kingdom, if a wilderness makes a kingdom, by simply calling it your own. You can purchase land in Mexico for ten cents an acre, and it would not command even this almost nominal price were it not wanted for cattle-rearing. When we buy or sell land, the price paid is not for a mere stretch of earth, but either for improvements or conditions, for something given to the land by the efforts of man, or for something that has been developed in connection with the land as a consequence of man's relation to it. Conditions make the wealth that pertains to land, and it is always conditions that we buy and sell. And we do not always pay for or obtain the price in labor and capital that the conditions absolutely cost. Many pieces of cultivated land, not near the great towns, can be purchased at a price that is probably less than it cost to clear them, fence them, drain them, break up the sod, plant orchards upon them, and construct roads that lead to them. We talk about buying land just as we talk about buying coal, lumber, fish, minerals, grain, etc., when in all cases we buy labor, conditions, or rights, the land or the substances themselves being free from the hand of Nature. What is the price of coal in the mine, of lumber in the distant forest, of fish in the sea, of metals buried a thousand feet deep in the hills, of the phosphorus and other elements that combine to make us wheat and corn? Nothing. Coal in a mine situated for working or transportation a little more favorably than coal in other