ival in the meanwhile
of acquired value, and more or less risk as to the final result.

Capital is necessarily to be distinguished from money, with which in
ordinary nomenclature it is almost identical. Wealth may be in other
things than money; oxen, wives, tools, have at different stages of
civilization represented the recognized form of capital; and modern
usage only treats capital as meaning the command of money because money
is the ordinary form of it nowadays. The capital of a country can scarce
be said to be less than the whole sum of its investments in a productive
form, and possessing a recognized productive value.

Adam Smith's distinction of "fixed" and "circulating" capital in the
_Wealth of Nations_ (book ii. c. i.) cannot fail to be always useful in
exhibiting the various forms and conditions under which capital is
employed. Yet the principal phenomena of capital are found to be the
same, whether the form of investment be more or less permanent or
circulable. The machinery in which capital is "fixed," and which yields
a profit without apparently changing hands, is in reality passing away
day by day, until it is worn out, and has to be replaced. So also of
drainage and other land improvements. When the natural forests have been
consumed and the landowners begin to plant trees on the bare places, the
plantations while growing are a source of health, shelter and
embellishment--they are not without a material profit throughout their
various stages to maturity--and when, at the lapse of twenty or more
years, they are ready to be cut down, and the timber is sold for useful
purposes, there is a harvest of the original capital expended as
essentially as in the case of the more rapid yearly crops of wheat or
oats. The chief distinction would appear to rest in the element of time
elapsing between the outlay of capital and its return. Capital may be
employed in short loans or bills of exchange at two or three months, in
paying wages of labour for which there may be return in a day or not in
less than a year or more, or in operations involving within themselves
every form of capital expenditure, and requiring a few years or
ninety-nine years for the promised fructification on which they proceed.
But the common characteristic of capital is that of a fund yielding a
return and reproducing itself whether the time to this end be long or
short. The division of expenditure or labour (all expenditure having a
destination to