ly in a meager and precarious way. If the instruments
are artificially made, or if they are furnished by nature in limited
amounts, they are forms of wealth, or goods; but as their function is
not to minister directly to consumers' wants, but to help in making
things which do this, we distinguish them by the name "producers'
goods" or "capital goods." In contrast with them those commodities
which directly minister to wants may be called "consumers' goods."

_The Production of Intermediate Goods._--All economic goods are means
to an end. Wealth is always mediate. It is usually a connecting link
between man's labor and the satisfaction of his wants. Man, the
worker, first spends himself on nature, and then nature in turn spends
itself on him. In production nature is the recipient, but in
consumption the recipient is man. This is saying that man serves
himself by means of some element in nature which, under his
manipulation, becomes a form of wealth. He thrusts a bit of natural
matter between himself as a producer and himself as a consumer. All
kinds of wealth, then, stand in an intermediate position between
original labor and the gratification that ultimately results from it.
Some goods, however, are means in the special sense of standing
between labor and other goods. Instruments help to make consumers'
goods and these add to man's pleasure. Using a tool is not generally
agreeable. The tool stands not only between the effort and the
gratification that will ultimately follow, but between the effort and
the further material good that will directly produce gratification.
The hatchet intervenes between the labor that makes it and the
firewood it will cut, while the wood acts directly on the man and
keeps him warm. Capital goods are in this special sense mediate. They
are not wanted for their own sake, but for the sake of something else
that is directly useful.[7]

[7] For an elaboration of the conception of mediate goods the
reader is referred to Von Boehm-Bawerk's work on "Positive
Theory of Capital" and to John Rae's work on "The
Sociological Theory of Capital."

_All Labor immediately Productive of Wealth._--When a savage abandons
the plan of fishing from the shore and gives his labor for a fortnight
to making a canoe with which to fish more effectively, he interposes
an interval of time between his labor and its ultimate fruits, the
consumers' goods. There is no such interval between the labor and the