There is a good Japanese maxim which says, "Dig a well before you are thirsty," and it is evidently very desirable to do so. But you must have capital to live upon while you are digging the well. In the same way, almost every mode of getting wealth without extreme labour requires that we shall have a stock of food to subsist upon while we are working and waiting, and #this stock is called capital#. In the absence of capital people find themselves continually in difficulties, and in danger of starvation. In the first of her tales on political economy, called "Life in the Wilds," Miss Martineau has beautifully described the position of settlers at the Cape of Good Hope, who are imagined to have been attacked by Bushmen and robbed of their stock of capital. She shows us how difficult it is to get any food or to do any useful work, because something else is wanted beforehand--some tool, or material, or at any rate time to make it. But there is no time to make anything, because all attention has to be given to finding shelter for the night, and something for supper. Everybody who wishes to understand the necessity for capital, and the way capital serves us, should read this tale of Miss Martineau, and then go on to her other tales about Political Economy. We can hardly say that capital is as requisite to production as land and labour, for the reason that capital must have been the produce of land and labour. There must always, indeed, be a little capital in possession, even though it be only the last meal in the stomach, before we can produce more. But there is no good attempting to say exactly how capital began to be collected, because it began in the childhood of the world, when men and women lived more like wild animals than as we live now. Certain it is that we cannot have loaves of bread, and knives and forks, and keep ourselves warm with clothes and brick houses, unless we have a stock of capital to live upon while we are making all these things. #Capital is requisite, then, not so much that we shall labour, but that we shall labour economically and with great success.# We may call it a secondary requisite, and it would be best to state the requisites of production in this way-- { #natural agent.# #Primary requisites# { { #labour.# #Secondary requisite# #capital.# #20. How to make Labour most Productive.# The great object must be to make labour as productive as possible, that is, to get as much wealth as we can with a reasonable amount of labour. In order to do this we must take care to labour in the most favourable way, and there is no difficulty in seeing that we ought to labour (1) #At the best time#; (2) #At the best place#; (3) #In the best manner#.