The author informs us, in fact, that he is "not writing a text-book," thereby intimating his opinion that it is less important to be clear and accurate when you are trying to bring about a political revolution than when a merely academic interest attaches to the subject treated. But he is not busy about anything so serious as a textbook: no, he "is only attempting to discover the laws which control a great social problem"--a mode of expression which indicates perhaps the high-water mark of intellectual muddlement. I have heard, in my time, of "laws" which control other "laws"; but this is the first occasion on which "laws" which "control a problem" have come under my notice. Even the disquisitions "of [173] those flabby writers who have burdened the press and darkened counsel by numerous volumes which are dubbed political economy" (p. 28) could hardly furnish their critics with a finer specimen of that which a hero of the "Dunciad," by the one flash of genius recorded of him, called "clotted nonsense." Doubtless it is a sign of grace that the author of these definitions should attach no importance to any of them; but since, unfortunately, his whole argument turns upon the tacit assumption that they are important, I may not pass them over so lightly. The third I give up. Why anything should be capital when it is "in course of exchange," and not be capital under other circumstances, passes my understanding. We are told that "that part of a farmer's crop held for sale or for seed, or to feed his help, in part payment of wages, would be accounted capital; that held for the care of his family would not be" (p. 31). But I fail to discover any ground of reason or authority for the doctrine that it is only when a crop is about to be sold or sown, or given as wages, that it may be called capital. On the contrary, whether we consider custom or reason, so much of it as is stored away in ricks and barns during harvest, and remains there to be used in any of these ways months or years afterwards, is customarily and rightly termed capital. Surely, the meaning of the clumsy phrase that capital is "wealth in the [174] course of exchange" must be that it is "wealth capable of being exchanged" against labour or anything else. That, in fact, is the equivalent of the second definition, that capital is "that part of wealth which is devoted to the aid of production." Obviously, if you possess that for which men will give labour, you can aid production by means of that labour. And, again, it agrees with the first definition (borrowed from Adam Smith) that capital is "that part of a man's stock which he expects to yield him a revenue." For a revenue is both etymologically and in sense a "return." A man gives his labour in sowing grain, or in tending cattle, because he expects a "return"--a "revenue"--in the shape of the increase of the grain or of the herd; and also, in the latter case, in the shape of their labour