§ 8. The process of "Saving" has received but scant attention from economic writers. Jevons appears to have held that superfluous food and other necessary consumptive goods, in whosoever hands they were, constituted the only true fund of capital in a community at any given time. Sidgwick also holds that all "Savings" are in the first instance "food." That this is not the case will appear from the following example:--A self-sufficing man produces daily for his daily consumption a quantity of food, etc., denoted by the figure 10. 5 of this is necessary and 5 superfluous consumption. This man, working with primitive tools, discovers an implement which will greatly facilitate his production, but will cost 4 days' labour to make. Three alternatives are open to him. He may spend half his working day in producing the strictly necessary part of his previous consumption, 5, and devote the other half to making the new implement, which will be finished in 8 days. Or he may increase the duration of his working day by one quarter, giving the extra time to the making of his new implement, which will be finished in 16 days. Or lastly, he may continue to produce consumptive goods as before, but only consume half of them, preserving the other half for 8 days, until he has a fund which will suffice to keep him for 4 continuous days, which he will devote to making the new implement. If he adopts the first alternative, he simply changes the character of his production, producing in part of his working day future goods instead of present consumptive goods. In the second he creates future goods by extra labour. In the third case only does the "saving" or new "capital" take as its first shape food. In the same way a community seeking to introduce a more "roundabout" method of production requiring new plant, or seeking to place in the field of industry a new series of productive processes to satisfy some new want, may achieve their object by "saving" food, etc., or by changing for awhile the character of their production, or by extra labour. Thus new capital, whether from the individual or the community point of view, may take either "food" or any other material form as its first shape. Since "savings" need not take the shape of food or any article capable of immediate consumption, Adam Smith and J.S. Mill are clearly wrong when they urge in terms almost identical[158] that what is saved is necessarily consumed, and consumed as quickly as that which is spent. The antithesis of saving and spending shows these writers, and the bulk of English economists who follow them, are misled, because they regard "saving" as doing something with money, and do not sufficiently go behind the financial aspect of putting money into a bank.