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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
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