176 NATURE OF CAPITAL AND INCOME [Cmar. X

the body itself. A large part of our subjective income is
due to our condition of health or disease. A man with a
good constitution has a more agreeable stream of con--sciousness,
 or subjective income, than one without. The
pains and sufferings of illness here find a place in the complete
 accounts of income and outgo. It is evident that
the wealthy man who confessed that he would exchange all
his millions for a young and vigorous body may be the
recipient of a large objective income, but not enjoy as
much subjective income as Walt Whitman, who had
searcely a dollar in the world.
That these subjective items are by no means to be despised
 by the economist, who has far too long busied himself
with a study of the superficial objective phenomena, is evident
 when we consider that a healthy body is absolutely
essential for receiving and enjoying the income from external
wealth. The man who is short-sighted enough to lose his
health in the pursuit of what he calls wealth will soon be
spending all of this sort of wealth to regain health; and we
need only visit the health resorts of Colorado and California:
to be struck with the number of cases of business men who
have found themselves in this predicament. Economists,
by fixing attention exclusively on physical phenomena,
leave out of account the most essential element of all, the
vigor of human life. The true “wealth of nations” is the
health of its individuals. A nation consisting of weak,
sickly, and short-lived individuals is poor compared with a
nation whose inhabitants are of the opposite type. Hence
it is that the devices of modern hygiene, sanitation, and
preventive medicine, which tend to increase human working
 power and enjoying power, are of greater economic
import than many of the luxurious and enervating devices
commonly connoted by “wealth.”
We see, then, that subjective income means simply one’s

whole conscious life. Every item of it comes via the body
of the person.