6 Transactions.—Miscellaneous. 
Whenever labour is devoted to the production of an implement, there is 
a sacrifice of present for future advantage. The sacrifice may be slight and 
the advantage great and almost immediate, but there is always some 
sacrifice. For instance, olive oil is direct wealth, useful for its own sake; 
if, instead of consuming it as food, the owner uses it as an implement to 
lubricate a steam-engine, he gets, as a reward for his slight sacrifice of 
present good, a vast return in labour saved. This is an extreme case at 
one end of the scale; at the other end, are improvements in land, where a 
sacrifice of the product of a year’s labour of, say, thirty men, may be given 
in exchange for a future increase of the yearly harvest, equal to the product 
of one man’s labour. A wealthy landowner in England would probably - 
undertake such a work, as he would make 33 per cent. interest on his out- 
lay; but it would not follow as a matter beyond dispute, that the employment 
of the labour in this manner was to the advantage of the community at 
large, or that, if both the sacrifice and the reward were evenly distributed, 
it would be worth while to incur the one for the sake of the other. 
Bearing in mind the division of wealth I have proposed, we may readily 
test the accuracy of the several statements made by Mill and other writers as 
to the effect of employing labour in the production of fixed and circulating 
capital (or wealth) respectively. It is stated that the increase of fixed, 
when it takes place at the expense of circulating capital, must be tempo- 
rarily prejudicial to the interests of the labourers. This is not quite 
accurate: labourers’ cottages would, under his definition, be fixed capital ; 
but it would not be prejudicial to the interests of the labourers themselves 
to employ labour in building them ; provided, of course, such employment 
were judicious—that is, that the cottages were required, and the still more 
urgent requirements of the labourers, food and clothing for instance, were 
already provided. The same may be said of workmen's club-houses, tea- 
gardens, theatres, taverns, and other places of use or amusement which 
workmen frequent. 
It is also stated that “there is a great difference between the effects of 
circulating and fixed capital on the gross produce of the country," the 
context showing that the former is supposed to be the more productive. 
A steam-engine, for instance, is fixed capital, the coal which is consumed 
in it is circulating ; the coal is, therefore, more productive than the steam- 
engine. Surely this is equivalent to saying that one shear of a pair of 
scissors does more work than the other. Although the steam-engine is 
fixed eapital the iron of which it is made is circulating; and it is, therefore, . 
a more productive employment of labour to manufacture unwrought iron 
than to make that same iron useful by putting it into an engine. The 
