But a bag of wheat, an ingot of iron, a quintal of
coal--are they the produce of labor? Did not Nature create them?"
The PROTECTIONIST: "Without doubt Nature _creates_ the
_elements_ of all things; but it is labor which produces their
_value_. I was wrong myself in saying that labor creates material
objects, and this faulty phrase has led the way to many other errors.
It does not belong to man, either manufacturer or cultivator, to
_create_, to make something out of nothing; if, by _production_, we
understand _creation_, all our labors will be unproductive; that of
merchants more so than any other, except, perhaps, that of law-makers.
The farmer has no claim to have _created_ wheat, but he may claim to
have created its _value_: he has transformed into wheat substances
which in no wise resembled it, by his own labor with that of his
ploughmen and reapers. What more does the miller effect who converts
it into flour, the baker who turns it into bread? Because man must
clothe himself in cloth, a host of operations is necessary. Before the
intervention of any human labor, the true raw materials of this
product (cloth) are air, water, gas, light, the chemical substances
which must enter into its composition.
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