Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/243

Rh return help them by giving them the money we have got for helping somebody else, and with it they buy the products or services of still other people.

The doctor helps the lawyer to get well. The lawyer helps the doctor to get something to eat and wear, by giving him some of the money he has got for helping other people to get their rights in the courts.

The mutual help of man and wife is usually in this form. Only in this case there is no stipulated return service for what the wife does, and she gets part of her reward in money and part in goods. She is to have her living—this the law provides. If the case comes into court, the amplitude of her living may be fixed, or rather the amplitude of her means of living. Otherwise, she may render a large service for a poor living, or get a good living for no service at all. But whatever service she does render is rendered directly, and it also, like the finished product in the fourth combination, enters immediately into the living of the other party to the mutual helpfulness.

6. There is a sixth combination of human effort, and a very important one. It is the combination of past with successive present efforts. In one form of it the material product of the past effort is called capital. In other forms it is non-material, and is called skill, education, training, reputation, prestige, or good-will. If a fisherman spends a week making a boat, we say he has spent a week accumulating capital. But if he spends five days learning how, and makes the boat in a day, we say he has spent a day in the production of capital. If he spends another week in learning to row it, he has still spent but one day in the accumulation of capital. But, none the less, he has done two weeks' work which will never bear fruit until it is combined with future work, and then it will (presumably) fertilize that future work and increase its fruitage.

So the past work of the dead father is combined with the present work of the living son. This, not only as embodied in the estate which he left him, but as manifested in his education, moral, mental, and manual. This combination links us to the whole past and the whole future. It needs to be very carefully studied.

For instance, the hasty critic may say that it is identical with the third combination, since in that the past labor of the cotton-planter is combined with the present labor of the weaver. But this criticism misses the point. In the third combination we combine the past efforts of others with our own present efforts in a single combination, resulting in a single product or service. In the sixth combination we combine identical past efforts, which may be our own, with a succession of our own present efforts, to produce a succession of similar or different products or services. Any individual fiber of cotton, once woven into cloth, and worn, is extinct; but the boat of the fisherman may be used over and over again for fishing, for hunting, for necessary journeys, or for pleasure.