For instance: Supposing a man owns a hundred acres of fertile land, that is his property, and though we call it wealth in ordinary conversation it is not real wealth at all. It is only the opportunity for producing wealth. If no one worked on that land, if no one even worked so little as to take the trouble of picking fruit off the trees or cutting the grass or looking after animals on it, it would be worth nothing. Supposing another man to own the stores of food and the houses and the clothing necessary for the livelihood of the labourers on the land, and also the horses and the ploughs and the stores of seeds necessary for farming, then that man owns the Capital only. But to the _labourers_ the important thing is that someone else owns the “Means of Production,” _without which they cannot live_, and they are equally dependent whether one or many control or own the _Means of Production_ in any particular case. _Their_ condition has for its main character _the fact that they do not own the “Means of Production.”_ Labour must be kept going. That is, human energy, for producing wealth from land, while it is at work, waiting between one harvest and another, will consume part of the stores of food and some proportion of the housing (which is a perishable thing, though it only perishes slowly) and of the clothing, and of the seed, etc. So we have to examine the various ways in which labour (which is not wealth) and land (which is not wealth) and capital (which _is_ wealth) may be controlled. There are three main types of human society which differ according to the way in which control is exercised over these three factors of Labour, Capital and Land. These three types are:-- 1. =The Servile State=: that is, the state in which the material Means of Production are the property of men who also own the human agents of Production. 2. =The Capitalist State=: that is, the state in which the material Means of Production are the property of a few, and the numerous human agents of Production are free, but without property. 3. =The Distributive State=: that is, the state in which the material means of Production are owned by the free human agents of Production. There is also a fourth imaginary kind of state which has never come into being, called the Socialist or Communist State. We will examine this in its right place, but the only three _actual_ states of which we know anything in history and can deal with as real human experiences, are these three just described: the _Servile_ State, the _Capitalist_ State, and the _Distributive_ State. But, before going farther, we must get hold of a very important principle, which is this:--