Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 1Roscher, Wilhelm
History
Principles of Political Economy, Vol. 1
Roscher, Wilhelm
Economics
Capital is mainly the result of saving which withdraws new products from
the immediate enjoyment-consumption of their possessor, and preserves
them, or at least their value, to serve as the basis of a lasting
use.(291) As capital represents the solidarity of the economic past,
present and future, it, as a rule, reaches back into the past and forward
into the future, through a period of time longer in proportion as its
amount and efficiency are greater.(292) Those producers, too, whose
products perish rapidly may, also, effect savings by exchanging their
products and capitalizing their counter-value. Thus, the actor, whose
playing leaves after it nothing but a memory, may use the wheat received
by him from a farmer who came to listen to him, in the employment of an
iron-worker, and invest the product permanently in a railroad. The
transformation may be effected by means of money, bonds etc., but it is
none the less real on that account. Order, foresight and self-restraint
are the intellectual conditions precedent of saving and capital. The
childish and hail-fellow-well-met disposition which cares only for the
present is inimical to it. True, the desire of saving can be developed
only where there are legal guarantees to ownership;(293) guarantees which
are both the conditions precedent and the effect of all economic
civilization.(294) The Indians, Esquimaux etc., had to be taught for the
first time by the missionaries and merchants—and it was with the greatest
difficulty it was done—to save their booty, and spare the natural sources
of their acquisition. Originally, they were, in the heat and excitement of
their wild hunting and fishing, wont to destroy on the spot what they
could not enjoy in the moment.(295) In the lowest stages of civilization,
the first saving of capital of any importance is effected frequently
through robbery or in the way of slavery.(296) In both cases, it is the
stronger who compel the weaker to consume less than they produce. See
_infra_, § 68. Where civilization is at its highest, the inclination to
save, as a rule, is very marked.(297) It begins to decline where a people
are themselves declining in civilization, and especially where legal
guarantees have lost their force.
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