that it does; it adds the property of being in the place where they are wanted, instead of being in some other place: which is a very useful property, and the utility it confers is embodied in the things themselves, which now actually are in the place where they are required for use, and in consequence of that increased utility could be sold at an increased price, proportioned to the labor expended in conferring it. This labor, therefore, does not belong to the third class, but to the first.

§ 3. We have now to consider which of these three classes of labor should be accounted productive of wealth, since that is what the term productive, when used by itself, must be understood to import. Utilities of the third class, consisting in pleasures which only exist while being enjoyed, and services which only exist while being performed, cannot be spoken of as wealth, except by an acknowledged metaphor. It is essential to the idea of wealth to be susceptible of accumulation: things which cannot, after being produced, be kept for some time before being used, are never, I think, regarded as wealth, since, however much of them may be produced and enjoyed, the person benefited by them is no richer, is nowise improved in circumstances. But there is not so distinct and positive a violation of usage in considering as wealth any product which is both useful and susceptible of accumulation. The skill, and the energy and perseverance, of the artisans of a country, are reckoned part of its wealth, no less than their tools and machinery.* According to this definition, we should regard all labor as productive which is employed in creating permanent utilities, whether embodied in human beings, or in any other animate or inanimate objects. This nomenclature I have, in

Some authorities look upon it as an essential element in the idea of wealth, that it should be capable not solely of being accumulated, but of being transferred; and inasmuch as the valuable qualities, and even the productive capacities, of a human being cannot be detached from him and passed to some one else, they deny to these the appellation of wealth, and to the labor expended in acquiring them the name of productive labor. It seems to me, however, that the skill of an artisan (for instance) being both a desirable possession and one of a certain durability (not to say productive even of material wealth), there is no better reason for refusing to it the title of wealth because it is attached to a man, than to a coalpit or

a manufactory because they are attached to a place. Besides, if the skill itself cannot be parted with to a purchaser, the use of it may; if it cannot be sold it can be hired; and it may be, and is, sold outright in all countries whose laws permit that the man himself should be sold along with it. Its defect of transferability does not result from a natural, but from a legal and moral obstacle.

The human being himself (as formerly observed) I do not class as wealth. He is the purpose for which wealth exists. But his acquired capacities, which exist only as means, and have been called into existence by labor, fall rightly, as it seems to me, within that designation.

a former publication,* recommended as the most conducive to the ends of classification; and I am still of that opinion.

But in applying the term wealth to the industrial capacities of human beings, there seems always, in popular apprehension, to be a tacit reference to material products. The skill of an artisan is accounted wealth, only as being the means of acquiring wealth in a material sense; and any qualities not tending visibly to that object are scarcely so regarded at all. A country would hardly be said to be richer, except by a metaphor, however precious a possession it might have in the genius, the virtues, or the accomplishments of its inhabitants; unless indeed these were looked upon as marketable articles, by which it could attract the material wealth of other countries, as the Greeks of old, and several modern nations have done. While, therefore, I should prefer, were I constructing a new technical language, to make the distinction turn upon the permanence rather than upon the materiality of the product, yet when employing terms which common usage has taken complete possession of, it seems advisable so to employ them as to do the least possible violence to usage; since any improvement in terminology obtained by straining the received meaning of a popular phrase, is generally purchased beyond its value, by the obscurity arising from the conflict between new and old associations.

I shall, therefore, in this treatise, when speaking of wealth, understand by it only what is called material wealth, and by productive labor only those kinds of exertion which produce utilities embodied in material objects. But in limiting myself to this sense of the word, I mean to avail myself of the full extent of that restricted acceptation, and I shall not refuse the appellation productive, to labor which yields no material product as its direct result, provided that an increase of material products is its ultimate consequence. Thus, labor expended in the acquisition of manufacturing skill I class as productive, not in virtue of the skill itself, but of the manufactured products created by the skill, and to the creation of which the labor of learning the trade is essentially conducive. The labor of officers of government, in affording the protection which, afforded in some manner or other, is indispensable to the prosperity of in

Essays on some Unsettled Questions of "Political Economy." Essay III. On

the words Productive and Unproduc tive.

dustry, must be classed as productive even of material wealth, because without it, material wealth, in anything like its present abundance, could not exist. Such labor may be said to be productive indirectly or mediately, in opposition to the labor of the ploughman and the cotton-spinner, which are productive immediately. They are all alike in this, that they leave the community richer in material products than they found it; they increase, or tend to increase, material wealth.

§ 4. By Unproductive Labor, on the contrary, will be understood labor which does not terminate in the creation of material wealth; which, however largely or successfully practised, does not render the community and the world at large richer in material products, but poorer by all that is consumed by the laborers while so employed.

All labor is, in the language of political economy, unproductive, which ends in immediate enjoyment, without any increase of the accumulated stock of permanent means of enjoyment. And all labor, according to our present definition, must be classed as unproductive, which terminates in a permanent benefit, however important, provided that an increase of material products forms no part of that benefit. The labor of saving a friend's life is not productive, unless the friend is a productive laborer and produces more than he consumes. To a religious person the saving of a soul must appear a far more important service than the saving of a life; but he will not therefore call a missionary or a clergyman productive laborers, unless they teach, as the South Sea Missionaries have in some cases done, the arts of civilization in addition to the doctrines of their religion. It is, on the contrary, evident that the greater number of missionaries or clergymen a nation maintains, the less it has to expend on other things; while the more it expends judiciously in keeping agriculturists and manufacturers at work, the more it will have for every other purpose. By the former it diminishes, cæteris paribus, its stock of material products; by the latter, it increases them.

Unproductive may be as useful as productive labor; it may be more useful, even in point of permanent advantage; or its use may consist only in pleasurable sensation, which, when gone, leaves no trace; or it may not afford even this, but may be absolute waste. In any case society or mankind grow no richer by it, but poorer. All material products consumed by anyone VOL. I.-4

while he produces nothing are so much subtracted, for the time, from the material products which society would otherwise have possessed. But, though society grows no richer by unproductive labor, the individual may. An unproductive laborer may receive for his labor, from those who derive pleasure or benefit from it, a remuneration which may be to him a considerable source of wealth; but his gain is balanced by their loss; they may have received a full equivalent for their expenditure, but they are so much poorer by it. When a tailor makes a coat and sells it there is a transfer of the price from the customer to the tailor, and a coat besides which did not previously exist; but what is gained by an actor is a mere transfer from the spectator's funds to his, leaving no article of wealth for the spectator's indemnification. Thus the community collectively gains nothing by the actor's labor; and it loses, of his receipts, all that portion which he consumes, retaining only that which he lays by. A community, however, may add to its wealth by unproductive labor, at the expense of other communities, as an individual may at the expense of other individuals. The gains of Italian opera singers, German governesses, French ballet dancers, etc., are a source of wealth, as far as they go, to their respective countries, if they return thither. The petty states of Greece, especially the ruder and more backward of those states, were nurseries of soldiers, who hired themselves to the princes and satraps of the East to carry on useless and destructive wars, and returned with their savings to pass their declining years in their own country: these were unproductive laborers, and the pay they received, together with the plunder they took, was an outlay without return to the countries which furnished it; but, though no gain to the world, it was a gain to Greece. At a later period the same country and its colonies supplied the Roman empire with another class of adventurers, who, under the name of philosophers or of rhetoricians, taught to the youth of the higher classes what were esteemed the most valuable accomplishments: these were mainly unproductive laborers, but their ample recompense was a source of wealth to their own country. In none of these cases was there any accession of wealth to the world. The services of the laborers, if useful, were obtained at a sacrifice to the world of a portion of material wealth; if useless, all that these laborers consumed was, to the world, waste.

To be wasted, however, is a liability not confined to unproductive labor. Productive labor may equally be wasted if more of it is expended than really conduces to production. If defect of skill in laborers, or of judgment in those who direct them, causes a misapplication of productive industry; if a farmer persists in ploughing with three horses and two men, when experience has shown that two horses and one man are sufficient, the surplus labor, though employed for purposes of production, is wasted. If a new process is adopted which proves no better, or not so good as those before in use, the labor expended in perfecting the invention and in carrying it into practice, though employed for a productive purpose, is wasted. Productive labor may render a nation poorer, if the wealth it produces-that is, the increase it makes in the stock of useful or agreeable thingsbe of a kind not immediately wanted: as when a commodity is unsalable, because produced in a quantity beyond the present demand; or when speculators build docks and warehouses before there is any trade. The bankrupt states of North America, with their premature railways and canals, have made this kind of mistake; and it was for some time doubtful whether England, in the disproportionate development of railway enterprise, had not, in some degree, followed the example. Labor sunk in expectation of a distant return, when the great exigencies or limited resources of the community require that the return be rapid, may leave the country not only poorer in the meanwhile, by all which those laborers consume, but less rich even ultimately than if immediate returns had been sought in the first instance, and enterprises for distant profit postponed.

§ 5. The distinction of Productive and Unproductive is applicable to consumption as well as to labor. All the members of the community are not laborers, but all are consumers, and consume either unproductively or productively. Whoever contributes nothing directly or indirectly to production, is an unproductive consumer. The only productive consumers are productive laborers, the labor of direction being of course included, as well as that of execution. But the consumption even of productive laborers is not all of it productive consumption. There is unproductive consumption by productive consumers. What they consume in keeping up or improving their health, strength, and capacities of work, or in rearing other productive laborers to succeed them, is productive consumption. But consumption on