onsumers' goods by labor only.
The rudest pick, shovel, or ax and the simplest hunting implement are
early types of what, in "capitalistic production," is represented by
mills with their intricate machines, ships, railroads, and the like.
Primitive industry has capital but is not highly capitalistic, since
labor and a little capital in simple forms are all that it requires.
These primitive capital goods are still essential.

_Capital._--It might seem that we have already described the nature of
capital, but we have not. We have described the kinds of goods of
which it consists. A sharp distinction is to be drawn between two ways
of treating capital goods, and only one of these ways affords a
treatment of capital properly so called. To attain that concept we
must think of goods as in some way constituting a stock which abides
as long as the business continues. And yet the things themselves
separately considered do not abide. Goods are perishable things; no
one lasts forever, and some last only a very short time. Raw materials
best serve their purpose when they are quickly transformed into usable
goods and taken out of the category of productive instruments. Tools
may last longer, but they ultimately wear out and have to be replaced.

_How Capital Goods Originate and Perish._--If you watch a particular
mediate good of the passive kind, say wood in a growing tree, you see
it beginning its career as an absolutely raw material, and then under
the hand of labor, aided by tools, receiving utility till it takes its
final form in some article for a consumer's use, say a dining table.
Little labor is applied to it during the first stage of the process,
that in which the tree is guarded and allowed to grow to a size that
fits it for conversion into lumber; but the cutting, carrying, sawing,
and fashioning are done by labor and tools, and under their
manipulations the wood "ripens" in the economic sense--that is, it
becomes quite fit for consumption. It is ready to serve a consumer as
a table, and, when this service begins, the wood that up to this point
has been a passive capital good, constantly receiving utilities, will
cease to be a capital good at all and begin slowly to wear out in the
service of its owner.[1]

[1] In the economic sense consumption is the utilization
rather than the destruction of the thing consumed, though
many things go rapidly to destruction in the process. Food is
destroyed in the momen