Natural Agents include not only "Nature's sun and showers," but also all the forces and fertilities and materials of free Nature, that men may and do avail themselves of in preparing commodities to exchange with the commodities of other men. Of higher rank in Production than these natural agencies are the Efforts of men in molding them so as to answer other men's Desires, of which efforts the "toiling hands" of the poet are a symbol. They include also the inventive brains and eloquent tongues and the skilful manipulations of every name. The poet's "ship" is an instance of capital, which is always a result of previous toil reserved to help on some future sales. These three elements, Nature, Labor, Capital, conspire in all production of commodities. Nature comes first with her free forces and materials; and then present toil aided by the results of past toil in the form of capital does all the rest in getting commodities ready to sell and selling them. Let us now note each of these three a little more closely. (a) Natural Agents. The most important point about these is, that they are the free gifts of God, and continue so throughout the complications and transformations wrought on them and through them by Labor and Capital, until the material commodity of whatever kind is finally sold, and so passes out of the purview of our Science. Many of the gifts of God, like the air we breathe and the light in which we recreate ourselves and the water of refreshment drunk from spring or brook, do not connect themselves in any way with commodities bought and sold, and nobody ever thinks of them as salable at all; but it has seemed and still seems to many, as if the natural fertility in a land-parcel, the water-fall along the course of river or stream, the timber-growth which the hand of man planted not, the deposit of gold or coal in the bowels of the earth, and other such-like cases in which natural gifts _do_ connect themselves with human services and then are sold, lifted the Value of the things sold above the point to which the mere human efforts, whether past or present, would raise it. In point of fact, this seeming is not a reality, as will fully appear in the sequel. God is a Giver, and never a Seller; and he has arranged it so in his great world of gifts, that, however much shrewd men may try to monopolize these gifts and then dole them out to other men for pay, they are always practically thwarted in the attempt. God himself never takes pay for anything, and has never authorized anybody to take pay in his behalf; and when this role of Seller of free gifts, which have cost him nothing and which he has not improved, is taken up by any one, he is shortly crowded off the stage in shame by other actors true to Nature.