CAPITAL AND ADSTINfiNCK. 633 



unless one man's increased consumption counterbalances and 

 so cancels another's abstinence. To realise the futility of 

 " saving' " in this way as a means of adding to accumulations, 

 we have only to suppose the case of everybody determining" 

 to save, ceasing to spend, and allowing his ijicome to accu- 

 mulate as a deferred claim. Then everybody will have a 

 claim over somebody else ; the claims will cancel each other, 

 and the supposed accumulations vanish. 



Now consider the bearing of this on one of the most 

 burning questions of the day, the war between Capital and 

 Labour, exemplified by these continual strikes — strikes 

 which, no matter how often the men are defeated (or appa- 

 rently defeated), grow more numerous, more extensive, and 

 inter-related, more highly organised, more bitter and more 

 dangerous every year. The economist, who is assumed to 

 be an expert and authority in these matters, and who is 

 generally a hard-headed clear thinker, shows something like 

 imbecility in dealing with this question. He hears that 

 Labour has risen against Capital, and instead of enquiring 

 what the thing is which the combatants call capital and are 

 lighting about, he seizes upon the loord, to which he attaches 

 a meaning quite different from theirs. He declares to them 

 that capital means food, tools, machinery ; that these are 

 necessary to labour, and the labourer is therefore a fool for 

 fighting against them. 



But the labourer is not fighting against these. He knows 

 as well as the economist that these things are necessary to 

 labour, and he is fighting for them, not against them, to get 

 what he considers a fairer share of them, not to do without 

 them. The "capital" which the labourer is fighting against 

 is not what the closet philosopher understands by the word, 

 but what both employer and employed, the financier in Par- 

 liament and the merchant in the city, the seller and the 

 buyer, the creditor and the debtor, the whole world, indeed, 

 except the economist, understands by " capital," and that is 

 money. Not money in the restricted and technical sense of 

 coin only, but money in its broad everyday commercial sense 

 of purchasing power, no matter in what shape—coin, notes, 

 title deeds, scrip, bank balances — that which gives its pos- 

 sessor command over the goods and services of other people, 

 and constitutes him in the eyes of the world a monied man. 



This tremendous power, known as capital or money, which 

 rules the market, floats companies, starts enterprise, deter- 

 mines whether labour shall or shall not have the opportunity 



