When we pass from these to men who lead a purely pastoral life, like the South American Gauchos, or some Asiatic nomads, there is an important change. Let us suppose the owner of a flock of sheep to live on the milk, cheese, and flesh which they yield. It is obvious that the flock stands to him in the economic relation of the mother to the child, inasmuch as it supplies him with food-stuffs competent to make good the daily and hourly losses of his capital of workstuff. If we imagine our sheep-owner to have access to extensive pastures and to be troubled neither by predacious animals nor by rival shepherds, the performance of his pastoral functions will hardly involve the expenditure of any more labour than is needful to provide him with the exercise required to maintain health. And this is true, even if we take into account the trouble originally devoted to the domestication of the sheep. It surely would be a most singular pretension for the shepherd to talk of the flock as the "produce" of his labour in any but a very limited sense. In truth, his labour would have been a mere accessory of production of very little consequence. Under the circumstances supposed, a ram and some ewes, left to themselves for a few years, would probably generate as large a flock; [154] and the superadded labour of the shepherd would have little more effect upon their production than upon that of the blackberries on the bushes about the pastures. For the most part the increment would be thoroughly unearned; and, if it is a rule of absolute political ethics that owners have no claim upon "betterment" brought about independently of their own labour, then the shepherd would have no claim to at least nine-tenths of the increase of the flock. But if the shepherd has no real claim to the title of "producer," who has? Are the rams and ewes the true "producers"? Certainly their title is better if, borrowing from the old terminology of chemistry, they only claim to be regarded as the "proximate principles" of production. And yet, if strict justice is to be dispensed, even they are to be regarded rather as collectors and distributors than as "producers." For all that they really do is to collect, slightly modify, and render easily accessible, the vital capital which already exists in the green herbs on which they feed, but in such a form as to be practically out of the reach of man. Thus, from an economic point of view, the sheep are more comparable to confectioners than to producers. The usefulness of biscuit lies in the raw flour of which it is made; but raw flour does not answer as an article of human diet, and biscuit does. So the usefulness of mutton lies mainly in certain chemical compounds which it [155] contains: the sheep gets them out of grass; we cannot live on grass, but we can on mutton.