Thus, there is necessary to productive operations, besides labour and natural agents, a stock, previously accumulated, of the products of labour. This accumulated stock is termed capital. Capital is frequently supposed to be synonymous with money, but money can afford no assistance to production. To do this it must be exchanged for other things capable of contributing to production. What capital does for production is to afford the shelter, tools, and materials which the work requires, and to feed and otherwise maintain the labourers during the process. Whatever things are destined for this use are capital. That industry is limited by capital is self-evident. There can be no more industry than is supplied with materials to work up and food to eat. Nevertheless, it is often forgotten that the people of a country are maintained and have their wants supplied, not by the produce of present labour, but of past, and it long continued to be believed that laws and governments, without creating capital, could create industry. All capital is the result of saving. Somebody must have produced it, and forborne to consume it, or it is the result of an excess of production over consumption. Although saved, and the result of saving, it is nevertheless consumed--exchanged partly for tools which are worn out by use, partly for materials destroyed in the using, and by consumption of the ultimate product; and, finally, paid in wages to productive labourers who consume it for their daily wants. The greater part, in value, of the wealth now existing in England has been produced by human hands within the last twelve months. A very small proportion, indeed, was in existence ten years ago. The land subsists, and is almost the only thing that subsists. Capital is kept in existence, not by preservation, but by perpetual reproduction. _II.--The Distribution of Wealth_ The laws and conditions of the production of wealth partake of the character of physical truths. There is nothing optional or arbitrary about them. It is not so with the distribution of wealth. That is a matter of human institution solely. Among the different modes of distributing the produce of land and labour which have been adopted, attention is first claimed by the primary institution on which the economical arrangements of society have always rested--private property. The institution of property consists in the recognition, in each person, of a right to the exclusive disposal of the fruits of their own labour and abstinence, and implies the right of the possessor of the fruits of previous labour to what has been produced by others by the co-operation between present labour and those fruits of past labour--that is, the freedom of acquiring by contract. We now proceed to the hypothesis of a threefold division of the produce, among labourers, landlords, and capitalists, beginning with the subject of wages.