Painful experience has shown all the inhabitants of Eu rope what a dearth was, and a period of general among a civilized people. At these mournful epochs, every one has heard it a hundred times observed, that it was not corn or food which was wanting, hut money. In deed, vast magazines of corn have often remained full till the next harvest ; those provisions, if proportionably shared among the people, would have almost always been sufficient for their support; hut the poor, having no money to offer, were not able to buy them ; they could not, in ex change for their labour, obtain money, or at least enough of it, to subsist. Money was wanting, natural wealth superabundant. What phenomenon could appear more proper to confirm the universal prejudice which looks for wealth in money, not in consumable capital ? But the money, which is wanting in a time of scarcity, is the wage offered to the workman to make him labour ; the wage, by means of which, lie would have purchased a subsistence. The workmen never labour, except when some of those who have accumulated capitals, or in other words, the fruit of preceding labours, can profit from those capitals, by furnishing, on one hand, the raw material, on the other, a subsistence for the artisan. Labour cannot be carried on so as to produce any material fruit, any fruit capable of becoming wealth, without raw materials on which to operate; the workman cannot labour without food to support him ; and, therefore, every kind of labour is impossible without a capital previously existing in ob jects of consumption, to furnish his materials and his wages ; and, if the workman himself lay out these ad vances, it is because he combines for this little object, the two characters of capitalist and artisan.
As the workman requires a capitalist, so the capitalist requires workmen; because his capital will be unproduc tive if it continue idle ; and the ITN cone which he expects and has to live upon, springs from the labour which he causes to be executed. Hence, whenever he is occupied in a productive enterprise, he employs all his capital in causing labour, and leaves no part of it in idleness. If he is a cloth-maker, and has devoted ten thousand pounds to his manufacture, he does not stop till his ten thousand pounds are done, and he no longer has new sums to em ploy in the operation. If it be then asked why he stops, he will answer, like the workman, that money is warning, that money does not circulate.
It is not, however, money which is then wanting any more than in the former case; it is consumption, or the consumer's revenue. On commencing his manufacture, the capitalist studied to adjust it to the demand ; and he reckoned that as soon as his cloths should be ready, they would be purchased by consumers, whose money, the sign of their revenue, would replace his capital, and become the sign of subsistence to 11C \V workmen, to whom he would pay new wages. It is not money which the con sumer is in want of, but revenue. Some have had inferior harvests this year ; sonic have gained a smaller interest on their capitals, a smaller share on the annual re-production of the fruits of industry ; others, who have no income but what arises from their labour, have not found employment; or else the whole three classes are not poorer than they were, but the manufacturer had imagined them to be richer, and regulated his production according to an in come which does not exist.
Income, of which we have seen all the different sources in the second chapter, is a material and consumable tiling; it springs from labour ; it is destined for enjoyment ; it is exactly of the same nature with the advances in wages and raw material, laid out by the manufacturer ; and mo ney is but the sign and the measure of it. The capital it should replace is also composed of material objects, des tined for consumption, and incessantly renewed. Money sere es but to represent it, and always forms the smallest part of each merchant's funds. We have supposed the cloth-maker to possess 100,0001.; but, if half this sum is employed in fixed capitals, it will be sufficient, if his sale amount weekly to 12001. to give him, in the shape of interest and profit, 20 per cent. on his circulating capital, and to allow 10001. weekly, in money, to main tain an annual production of 60,0001.; so that he never possesses in cash more than the fiftieth part of his circulating capital.
An increase of the national capitals is the most powerful encouragement of labour; either because this augmenta tion pre-supposes an augmentation of income, and, conse quently, of means of consumption; or because these capi tals, riot being profitable to their proprietor, except as they are employed, each capitalist incessantly endeavours to create a new production by their means. In distribut ing them to his workmen, he gives to those workmen a revenue which enables them to purchase and consume the preceding year's production ; and he sees those capitals return increased by the revenue, which he is to expect from them in the following year's production. But though he distributes and afterwards recovers them, by means of the circulating medium, which serves for all exchanges, it is not the circulating medium which forms the essential requisite in his operation. The same cloth-maker, la bouring each year on an equal quantity, sends 2400 pieces of cloth to the market, which have been valued at 60,0001. or 251. a piece. He exchanges 400 pieces for such ob jects of consumption as are needed to supply the wants, the enjoyments, the luxuries of himself and family. lie exchanges 2000 pieces for the raw materials, and the la bour which, within the year, are to re-produce an equal quantity ; and thus next year, and every following year, he will have, as before, 2400 pieces to exchange on the same conditions. His capital, equally with his revenue, is actually in cloths, not in money ; and the perpetual re sult of his commerce is to exchange cloth against cloth.