_The Use of Capital Goods Universal._--There is no doubt that capital goods are used in the most primitive industry. Implements existed in times too remote for tracing; and even if they had not been used, raw material would have been indispensable. People living in an economic stage so ultraprimitive as to use no mediate goods whatever could sustain life only by plucking wild fruit or gathering fish or other food stuff by hand, and so long as they could do this their industry might conceivably consist in getting consumers' 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]