_The Transition of Goods from one State to Another._--The beginning of its service in the purchaser's dining room takes the wood of the table out of the category of producers' goods; but there is some raw material that is never destined to emerge from that category and enter another. Its last state of existence as a good will be that in which it is embodied, not in an article for consumers' use, but in an active tool. Our tree might have furnished some of its wood for a wheelbarrow, and if so, that part of it would have been a capital good until it ceased to be an economic good at all. If we watch it as it grows toward its economic maturity, we see it sawed, planed, and otherwise fashioned under the laborer's hand, and maintaining during all this time its passive attitude, just as does the wood that is destined to constitute a table. When the wheelbarrow is completed, it does not, like the table, begin to minister directly to consumers' wants, but begins actively to aid some laborer in a further productive operation. It carries mortar to the wall of an unfinished building and is thus taken out of the list of passive goods--recipients of utility--and is ranged with other active tools which impart utility. The same thing is true of the steel that is destined to compose the head of a modern woodman's ax or the stone that is in process of fashioning into the rude hatchet of some primitive savage. As raw or partly wrought material it is a passive capital good; later it becomes an instrument of the active sort. _The Ultimate Perishability of all Kinds of Goods artificially Made._--In the end both kinds of material will cease to be capital goods. The raw stuff that goes into food, clothing, furnishings, or the like will become consumers' goods, while the raw material of tools will, in its final form, the tools themselves, have one more lease of life as capital goods. In the end, however, as wheelbarrows, axes, hatchets, and the whole long list of active implements are used up, they cease to be capital goods because they cease to be economic goods at all. They are as truly ordained to be ultimately used up as are food and clothing, and this is true of the most durable things that are artificially made. Walls, roadways, bridges, and buildings slowly deteriorate till the time comes when for productive purposes their room is worth more than their company.