INTRODUCTORY

7

changed, and, fulfilling the conditions of utility and scarcity,
comes within the range of our definition of wealth. An
alternative mode of dealing with the matter is to admit a
special category of “ personal wealth,” differing from ordinary
wealth in being bound up with the person, and to class skill
and similar qualities as “personal wealth.” For almost all
purposes, the former seems to be a sufficient solution of the
difficulty, inasmuch as rights are admitted, with material
goods, as elements in the aggregate of an individual's wealth.
In forming an estimate of the wealth of a community,
the existence of qualified rights of ownership must, of course,
not be overlooked. A mortgaged property is not a representative
 of wealth, in addition to the mortgage on it, equal
to what it would represent if not mortgaged. There is the
same wealth in either case, but the ownership of it is divided
between mortgagor and mortgagee if it be a mortgaged
property. So, too, the bonds of the State debt, or of a
municipal debt, are items in the individual wealth of their
owners, but in estimating the wealth of the community we
do not need to add these evidences of debt to the aggregate
of the physical property of the community, except in so far
as they represent claims against outside communities. In
some respects, the wealth of the community includes items
aot forming part of the private wealth of any of its members.
Thus a public park is not a part of the private wealth of any
citizen, where its use is free to all. To the community
which owns and maintains it, however, it is certainly wealth.
So, too, with other similar public property.
Wealth is not made up solely of material goods, as already
 indicated. It includes also rights to goods and to
services which do not get embodied in material form. Those
who produce, or aid in producing, wealth in a non-material
form, are productive workers, equally with those whose
labours are directed to the creation of material goods. At
one time it was the custom to speak of all who were not
concerned in the direct production of durable material goods
as unproductive. But the work of those engaged in transportation
 industries, though it produce no change of form, or
of name, of the goods which they handle, is a part of the