◆¹ I said in the last chapter that machinery or Fixed Capital was congealed Wage Capital. But as Wage Capital is metamorphosed into machinery only owing to the fact that it is at once the instrument and the guide of Human Exertion, machinery may be called congealed exertion also. This description of it is but half original; for Socialistic writers have for a long time called it “congealed Labour.” But between the two phrases there is a great and fundamental difference, and I now bring them thus together to show what the difference is. The first includes the whole meaning of the second, whereas the second includes only a part of the meaning of the first. Let us take the finest bronze statue that was ever made, and also the worst, the feeblest, the most ridiculous. ◆² Both can with equal accuracy be called congealed Labour; but to call them this is just as useless a truism as to call them congealed bronze. It describes the point in which the two statues resemble each other; it tells us nothing of what is far more important—the points in which the two statues differ. They differ because, whilst both are congealed Labour, the one is also congealed imagination of the highest order, the other is also congealed imagination of the lowest. The excellence of the metal and of the casting may be the same in both cases. Or again, let us take a vessel like the _City of Paris_, and let us take also the vessel that was known as the _Bessemer Steamer_. The _Bessemer Steamer_ was fitted with a sort of rocking saloon, which, when the vessel rolled, was expected to remain level. The contrivance was a complete failure. The hundreds of thousands of pounds spent on it were practically thrown away, and the structure ended by being sold as old iron. Now these two vessels were equally congealed Labour, and congealed Labour of precisely the same quality; for the workmen employed on the _Bessemer Steamer_ were as skilful as those employed on the _City of Paris_. And yet the Labour in the one case was congealed into a piece of lumber, and in the other case it was congealed into one of the most perfect of those living links by which the lives of two worlds are united. To call both the vessels, then, congealed Labour, only tells us how success resembles failure, not how it differs from it. The _City of Paris_ differs from the _Bessemer Steamer_ because the _City of Paris_ was congealed judgment, and the _Bessemer Steamer_ was congealed misjudgment.