_Prudent adjustment of capital._—A still further adjustment is required by prudence between the capital put into fixed forms and the circulating capital needed for best use of the more lasting machinery. A farmer is said to be stock poor when he overloads his farm or crowds his farm buildings with growing stock. Having all his capital in stock, he is unable to handle it to advantage, and must readjust his capital in live stock to his capital in the farm and machinery by selling some of his stock and adding to the value of his farm. On the other hand, many a farmer is land poor, where the bulk of his capital is invested in land, while he cannot command circulating capital in stock and wages sufficient to make the land useful. He needs, in the spirit of prudence, to sell some of his land for the sake of current funds to invest in live stock and in labor. The same principle applies to all investments of capital. A railroad may so exhaust the funds of the community in building it that it cannot be fairly manned for work. Sometimes a whole nation invests so largely in permanent forms of capital as to bring distress and poverty from want of means to use the great machine. Prudence also requires a further adjustment between the amount of labor directly producing wealth and that employed in what may be called the arts of consumption, contributing directly to personal comfort and enjoyment. The neatness of a farmer’s yard, outbuildings, fences and machinery is a part of his welfare. It also indicates a certain thrift, which enhances the value of the farm. But it is a proper sign of such thrift when it grows naturally out of the productive energy employed upon the crops and the stock. The wealth used in maintaining this neatness is not wasted, but it will not reproduce itself. It must be supplied from other sources in direct production. All services in the household, in contributing to bodily comfort of the family, make an essential part of human welfare, but prudence requires such an adjustment of these services to the total wealth-producing energy that they may be maintained without reducing the total power. All public expenditures in the care of streets and parks are an essential to welfare so long as the sources of wealth production are kept the more active from such advantages. The test of prudence in all such adjustment is the increase of power in wealth-production, along with increasing welfare. _Provision for future wants._—True prudence is largely foresight, and so is the enterprise of speculative energy which provides any product for a future market. No more careful adjustment is necessary than that which secures such a product of farm or factory as the world will need when it reaches its actual market. The greatest wisdom is needed in studying the conditions of a community with reference to its future wants, and the supply actually accumulating for meeting those wants.