dead. It seems unnecessary to warn the
reader against confusing the "_making_" of money by hook or crook, by
trick or trade, with the _creating_ of wealth, by the product of labor. In
calling the old conceptions childish, I do not mean that they contain no
element of truth whatever; I mean that they are shallow, scientifically or
spiritually meagre, narrow in their vision, wrong in their accent; I
especially mean that they are dumb, because they are blind, regarding the
central matter that wealth is the natural offspring of Time and Human
Toil. The old conceptions do indeed imply that wealth and capital involve
both potential and kinetic use-values, and in so far they are right. But
how do such use-values arise?

The potential use-values in wealth are created by human work operating in
time upon raw material given by nature. The use-values are produced by
time-taking transformations of the raw materials; these transformations
are wrought by human brain labor and human muscular labor directed by the
human brain acting in time. The kinetic use-values of wealth are also
created by human toil--mainly by the intellectual labor of observation,
experimentation, imagination, deduction and invention, all consuming the
precious time of short human lives. It is obvious that in the creation of
use-values whether potential or kinetic, the element of _time_ enters as
an absolutely essential factor. The fundamental importance of time as a
factor in the production of wealth--the fact that wealth and the use-values
of wealth are literally the natural offspring of the spiritual union of
time with toil--has been completely overlooked, not only by the economics,
but by the ethics, the jurisprudence and the other branches of speculative
reasoning, throughout the long period of humanity's childhood. In the
course of the ages there has indeed been much "talk" about time, but there
has been no recognition of the basic significance of time as essential in
the conception and in the very constitution of human values.

It is often said that "Time is Money"; the statement is often false; but
the proposition that Money is Time is always true. It is always true in
the profound sense that Money is the measure and symbol of Wealth--the
product of Time and Toil--the crystallization of the time-binding human
capacity. IT IS THUS TRUE THAT MONEY IS A VERY PRECIOUS THING, THE MEASURE
AND SYMBOL OF WORK--IN PART THE WORK OF THE LIVING BUT, IN THE MAIN, THE