one hand, a permanent amount of
working energy, on the other, are always present, but they are in
goods and men respectively. Each may well be described by the use of
an abstract term, and in practical life it commonly is so; but it is a
concrete reality.

_Peculiarity of Land as a Capital Good._--One reservation needs
to be made when we call capital goods perishable. If we include
land under this term, we must make it an exception to the rule
of destructibility. It is the only thing that does not go out of
existence in the using. It is not a produced good at all and does not
stand, like other goods, in an intermediate position between labor and
the gratification that labor is intended to produce. Work did not
create it and using will not end it. It will be called, in our study,
a capital good, for it is a form of wealth which produces other
wealth. It enters into the permanent productive fund that society is
using.

_Differences between Land and Other Capital Goods Important in
Economic Dynamics._--It is in a later part of the study which deals
with economic changes--the part which we shall call Economic
Dynamics--that the differences between land and artificially made
goods become prominent, and these differences will receive due
emphasis in their proper place. In studying the law which would govern
economic society if no essential economic changes were taking
place,--in reducing society, as it were, to a static state,--we find
that there is a certain set of characteristics which land shares with
those capital goods which are the products of human industry. In
static studies it is best to group the productive instruments which
men make with the one unmade good which nature furnishes and to
recognize that together they embody the permanent fund of productive
wealth.[4]

[4] What is commonly termed land contains elements which
perish in the using. Such are deposits of coal, ores, or oil,
and those ingredients of loam which are exhausted by tillage.
Such elements of the soil are not land in the economic sense.
How they should be regarded will be shown in a later chapter.

_Mobility an Attribute of Capital._--Even in a static society capital
would be permanent, while particular capital goods would be
perishable. In dynamic studies another quality of capital, as
distinguished from capital goods, comes into the foreground, namely,
mobility. It is the power to move without loss from one industry to