consumers'
wants, but begins actively to aid some laborer in a further productive
operation. It carries mortar to the wall of an unfinished building and
is thus taken out of the list of passive goods--recipients of
utility--and is ranged with other active tools which impart utility.
The same thing is true of the steel that is destined to compose the
head of a modern woodman's ax or the stone that is in process of
fashioning into the rude hatchet of some primitive savage. As raw or
partly wrought material it is a passive capital good; later it becomes
an instrument of the active sort.

_The Ultimate Perishability of all Kinds of Goods artificially
Made._--In the end both kinds of material will cease to be capital
goods. The raw stuff that goes into food, clothing, furnishings, or
the like will become consumers' goods, while the raw material of tools
will, in its final form, the tools themselves, have one more lease of
life as capital goods. In the end, however, as wheelbarrows, axes,
hatchets, and the whole long list of active implements are used up,
they cease to be capital goods because they cease to be economic goods
at all. They are as truly ordained to be ultimately used up as are
food and clothing, and this is true of the most durable things that
are artificially made. Walls, roadways, bridges, and buildings slowly
deteriorate till the time comes when for productive purposes their
room is worth more than their company.

_Why the Perishability of Capital Goods does not put Capital out of
Existence._--Perishability is the most striking trait of capital
goods. Each particular one comes and goes, but there is always a stock
of them on hand; for when one is on the point of going, another is
ready to take its place and keep up the succession. New tools replace
old tools; new materials replace those that are finished and
withdrawn, and so it comes about that a stock of such things abides
forever. Not one of the individual instruments is permanent, for each
one only does its part in keeping up an endless procession. It is the
procession that is always there--a moving series of individual goods,
not one of which has more than a transient economic career. Each one
helps to keep up the supply of permanent capital just as each man,
taking his turn in an endless succession of laborers, serves during
his brief life to keep up the permanent force of laboring humanity.
Men come and go, but "labor"--a mass of working humanity--ab