sted in a
business does not suggest to any one a literal pile of a million
silver or paper dollars or of a hundred thousand gold eagles. It
suggests what is actually in the business, a procession of things each
of which comes into the man's possession and then leaves him, and
helps him to keep the constant stock of goods that at any time is a
potential million of dollars. A permanent body of any kind, if it is
made up of shifting tissues, is commonly described by the use of an
abstract term. A waterfall, made as it is of rapidly changing drops of
water, is spoken of as a "water power," since the power is the abiding
thing. An endless series of living human beings is described as
"humanity," since that remains through all personal changes. An
endless series of workingmen is described as "labor," and we study the
"wages of labor," the "relations of labor to capital," etc., because
these are permanent relations. Men come and go, but labor continues
and is the source of a permanent income. It is actually the fact that
in speaking of the "labor problem" or the "relation of capital and
labor" we usually think of "labor in the abstract," as we might term
it; but this is very far from implying that we consider a series of
generations of actual workingmen as an abstraction. We may, using
terms in a like way, speak of the problem of interest as concerning
"capital in the abstract"; but this is far from meaning that we
consider an endless series of material instruments of industry an
abstraction. We describe these real things by the use of an abstract
term, just as we describe a thousand other realities. A "fund," a
"value," a "permanent quantum of wealth," is capital; but with the
abstract notion the mind always merges the thought of the concrete
entity. It is the tools of industry that, in their endless march,
come into and go out of the industrial field that we think of even
when we use the abstract term. This term, however, saves us from the
danger of thinking merely of particular tools that we can identify and
trace to their final destruction when we form the concept of capital.

_The Importance of discriminating between the Concept of Capital Goods
and that of Capital._--Very great is the importance of keeping sharply
distinct the two concepts of productive wealth of which one is
described by the term _capital goods_ and the other by the term
_capital_. In the one case we think of a particular thing which we
identify, keep