ment. All that we are at present
interested in knowing is that practical usage treats capital
as a permanent fund of productive wealth, and most
conveniently describes it as a fixed amount of money
"invested" in goods of a productive kind. What is thought of
as "money" abides. Of course the practical man does not
regard it as actually composed of currency.

_The Chief Attribute of Capital._--A chief attribute of capital,
properly so called, is permanence. If a man's productive fund does not
last, he is impoverished. The farmer keeps on hand a more or less
constant supply of the implements he has to use. He takes a part of
the proceeds of the sale of his crops, puts it into the shape of
implements and materials, and in this way keeps an amount of them on
hand as the auxiliary capital of agriculture. Particular goods are not
constant, but the sum of money or quantum of wealth "invested" in the
moving procession of them is so. At any one instant the capital is
composed of particular instruments which can be sought out and
identified, but at no two instants are the goods the same.

_The Reasons for describing Capital as a Sum of Money._--This fact
explains the general practice of describing capital in terms of money.
The manufacturer just referred to will speak of his capital as "a
million dollars" and consider that sum as a "permanent investment"
because he knows that while the goods that now represent that value
will soon pass from him, the "dollars"--that is, the value which is
equivalent to the dollars--will abide. There is, moreover, no failure
on his part to discriminate between his capital and literal money, for
he knows in what his productive fund consists, and is fully aware that
only the minutest part of it is in the shape of actual currency.

Instruments of production compose the fund, but the dollars serve to
describe it. They indicate the amount and the abiding quality of it,
since they describe what he has invested or embodied in the shifting
things and can, by a fair sale, get out of them.

_Why Abstract Terms are used in popularly describing Capital._--In
certain connections money is, in unintelligent thinking, confused with
real capital in ways that we should guard against. In avoiding such
errors we need to be even more careful that we do not miss the truth
that is at the basis of the common mode of describing capital. A
permanent fund that is spoken of as a million dollars inve