◆¹ Machinery, therefore, or Fixed Capital, though it differs as soon as it is made from Capital employed in wages, is the result of the use of such Capital, and is indeed but another form of it. And now comes the point on which I am concerned to insist here: that conversely Wage Capital, when employed so as to increase the productivity of labour,—in other words when employed by men with the requisite capacity,—is in its essence but another form of machinery. Machinery may be called congealed Wage Capital. Wage Capital may be called fluid machinery. For the function of both—namely, to increase wealth—is the same, and they fulfil this function by means of the same virtue residing in them. It is easy to see the truth of this. The increase of wealth means the improvement and multiplication of commodities which reward the exertions of the same number of men. The number and quality of these commodities are increased by application of Capital, because Capital enables persons who are exceptionally gifted to control and direct the exertions of the majority; and Capital, as embodied in machinery, differs from Capital continuously employed in wages, only because the former gives us machinery which is inanimate, and the latter, machinery which is living. For a thousand men so organised as to produce some given product or result, and to produce it with the greatest precision or in the least possible time, are to all intents and purposes as much an invention and a machine as a thousand wheels or rollers adjusted for a similar purpose. [Sidenote ◆1 And therefore all Capital, equally with Wage Capital, represents the control of Intellect over Labour—or one kind of Human Exertion over another.] ◆¹ All Capital, therefore, in all its distinctively modern applications—all those applications which have caused what is called industrial progress—is virtually this, and this only: it is the exceptional capacities of one set of men applied to the average capacities of another set. We may accordingly include all Capital—fixed and circulating—under one head, and say of it as a whole what in the last chapter was said of machinery: that when by its application to the exertions of a given number of men a larger product results than resulted from them before it was applied, Capital is to be credited with producing the amount of the increase; or—to put the same thing in another way—with the amount of the decrease which would result if its application were withdrawn. [Sidenote ◆1 This aspect of the question will be considered further in the next chapter.]