ly as it is employed at present. Indeed, so long as they
continued to demand the luxuries which machines produce, it might seem
that it was hardly possible for them to get rid of their capital at all.
But what would really happen may be briefly explained thus:--

If we take the case of any modern country, the amount of its income at
any given time depends for its sustentation on machines already in
existence; and its increase is dependent on the gradual supersession of
these by new ones yet more efficient. But the efficiency of the former
would soon begin to decrease, and would ultimately disappear altogether,
unless they were constantly repaired and their lost substance was
renewed; while the latter would never exist unless there were men to
make them. Hence, under modern conditions, in any prosperous and
progressive country, a large portion of what is called the manufacturing
class is always engaged, not in producing articles of consumption,
comfort, or luxury, but in repairing and renewing the machines by which
such articles are at present multiplied, or else in constructing new
machines which shall supplement or replace the old. Thus, in Great
Britain, towards the close of the nineteenth century, these makers and
repairers of machinery were, with the exception of coal-miners, the
industrial body whose proportional increase was greatest. In the modern
world the spending of capital as income is a process which, in
proportion as it became general, would accomplish itself by affecting
the position of men like these. It would consist of a withdrawal of men
who are at present occupied in maintaining existing machines, or else in
constructing new ones from their anvils, hammers, files, lathes, and
furnaces, and making them dance instead. This withdrawal would, in
proportion as it became general, render the construction of new machines
impossible, and would leave the efficiency of those now in use to
exhaust itself.

That such is the case is illustrated on a small scale by the conduct of
individuals who live on their capital now. If a farmer, whose capital
consists largely of an agricultural plant, desires to spend more than
his proceeds of his farm are worth, he virtually takes the men who have
been mending his barns and reapers, and sets them to build a buggy which
will take him to the neighbouring races. The varnish on the buggy is
bought with the rust on the reaper's blades; the smart, weather-proof
apron with the barn