878 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
capitalist’s costly machines (fixed wealth or capital) and the passion 
or necessity to continually add to the number and power of his 
auxiliary machines, and to protect and keep them ever at work, 
must inevitably abstract the greater portion of his increasing or 
decreasing profits, and which the thou ghtless and the mere literary 
emotionalist imagine are altogether “absorbed in personal con- 
sumption. 
What is usually termed “the enormous accumulations of wealth 
in our times,” “the riches of capitalists,” do not consist of fine 
houses, luxurious equipages, money, or grand parks, or, if so, it 
only forms a most insignificant portion of it. The great bulk of 
the nominal and real wealth of capitalists consists of land improve- 
ments, mines, railways, tramways, ships, canals, stores, warehouses, 
manufactories, machines, tools and instruments, &ec., themselves ; 
and though rightly included in the ageregate ‘fixed wealth of a 
country by Statisticians, these do not in any sense enter into the 
personal consumption of the rich owner any more than they enter 
into the personal consumption of the workman engaged in con- 
nection with such forms of national wealth. 
The mass of Socialist writers wish us to infer that the ‘‘ toil” of 
the ‘‘ masses,” ‘the lower ten millions,” alone “is the active factor 
that produces all wealth.” Entertaining such a view, it is not 
remarkable that they should regard the riches of the “ upper ten 
thousand” as a hoard mysteriously and wrongfully abstracted 
from the forces actively engaged in producing wealth. 
Tf by the toil of the masses they mean that all the physical 
forces requisite to transport and transform natural materials to 
suit the needs of man, they are manifestly wrong ; for (exclusive 
of the mere gratuitous forces of Nature, such as natural chemical 
changes, multiplication by the mysterious forces of life, sunlight 
and heat forces, gravitation, the rain, dew, and the fertile soils, 
and the animal, vegetable, and mineral products in their natural 
state and position) there are the active forces set in motion, not 
of the expenditure of muscular energy, but of mental and moral 
force, exerted by men of forethought, of skill, of invention, and 
of the provident who designedly saved from immediate personal 
consumption, and devoted such savings purposely to the construc- 
tion of mechanical and other aids devised or discovered by skilled 
minds, whereby the forces of Nature, such as gravitation, chemistry, 
steam, water, wind, electricity, leverage, lower animals are so 
captured, tamed and drilled, that they now exert a physical force 
in the production of man’s wealth—whether in the way of trans- 
porting from place to place, or in transforming materials from the 
natural raw state to the highly finished—compared with which 
the brute or muscular force actually exerted by all the working 
men of the globe, forms the most insignificant fraction. 
