◆¹ Wealth as a whole, therefore, is something so totally distinct from money that there is no ground for presuming it to be divisible in the same way. What is wealth, then, in a country like our own? To some people this will seem a superfluous question. They will say that every one knows what wealth is by experience—by the experience of possessing it, or by the experience of wanting it. And in a certain sense this is true, but not in any sense that concerns us here. In precisely the same sense every one knows what health is; but that is very different from knowing on what health depends; and to know the effects of wealth on our own existence is very different from knowing the nature of the thing that causes them. Indeed, as a matter of fact, what wealth really consists of is a thing which very few people are ever at the trouble to realise; and nothing shows that such is the case more clearly than the false and misleading images which are commonly used to represent it. ◆² The most familiar of these are: “a treasure,” “a store,” “a hoard,” or, as the Americans say, “a pile.” Now any one of these images is not only not literally true, but embodies and expresses a mischievous and misleading falsehood. It represents wealth as something which could be carried off and divided—as a kind of plunder which might be seized by a conquering army. But the truth is, that the amount of existing wealth which can be accurately described, or could be possibly treated in this way, is, in a country like ours, a very insignificant portion; and, were social conditions revolutionised to any serious degree, much of that portion would lose its value and cease to be wealth at all. [Sidenote ◆1 Many kinds of wealth that are considered typical would become almost valueless if divided: for instance, a great house and its contents.]