He draws air into his lungs, taking it from a condition where it does him no good to a condition where it keeps him alive. He sows seed; he brings food from a distance; he cooks it for his eating. To give himself shelter from the weather he moulds bricks out of clay and puts them together into houses. To get himself warmth he cuts down wood and brings it to his hearth, or he sinks a shaft and gets coal out of the earth, and so on. Man is perpetually changing the things around him from a condition in which they are _less_ useful to him into a condition where they are _more_ useful to him. _Whenever a man does that he is said to be creating, and adding to, Human Wealth_: part of which is Economic Wealth, that is Wealth suitable for study under the science of Economics. Wealth, therefore, that thing the nature and growth of which we are about to study, is, so far as man is concerned, the result of this process of changing things to man’s use, and it is through looking closely at the nature of this process that we get to understand what is necessary to it, and what impedes it, and how its results are distributed among mankind. We must next go on to think out _how_ wealth is so produced. We have already seen what the general statement on this is: Wealth is produced by man’s consciously transforming things around him to his own uses; and though not everything so transformed has true _Economic Wealth_ attaching to it (for instance, breathing in air does not produce Economic Wealth), yet all Economic Wealth is produced as _part_ of this general process. Now when we come to examine the Production of Wealth, we shall find that _three_ great separate forces come into it; and these we shall find to be called conveniently “Land,” “Labour” and “Capital.” Let us take a particular case of the production of Economic Wealth and see how it goes forward. Let us take the case of the production of, say, 100 sacks of wheat. 1. LAND. A man finds himself possessed of so much land, and when he sets out to produce the 100 sacks of wheat, the following are the conditions before him. There are natural forces of which he takes advantage and without which he could not grow wheat. The soil he has to do with has a certain fertility, there is enough rainfall to make the seeds sprout, and so on. All these natural forces are obviously necessary to him. Though we talk of man “creating” wealth he does not really create anything. What he does is to use and combine certain natural forces of which he is aware. He has found out that wheat will sprout if it is put into the ground at a particular season, and that he will get his best result by preparing the ground in a particular manner, etc. These natural forces are the foundation of the whole affair.