274 
WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
laborers themselves out of the wages paid them. Wages 
therefore represent this form of capital, whether paid in money 
or in rent and groceries and dry goods. 
Capital is not money but things in one or other of these forms. 
What a manufacturer wants is not money but a steam engine 
and gearing and spindles and looms and cotton. Laborers look 
at their money wages only as means for procuring food and 
raiment and the protection of a home. Money is but the con¬ 
venient instrument of exchange. The same money may go 
out of a bank in the morning, run around a busy circuit and 
get back in the afternoon. In its circuit perhaps, it sent a ma¬ 
chine to the shop, and a load of wool to the mill, and a load of 
potatoes to the laborer’s home, but it comes back just what it 
went out; money is nothing else, though its value is represented 
three-fold in as many forms of capital. So far as money has 
in itself real value it is a part of the products of former labor 
saved and set apart for this specific service in the exchange of 
products. So it is capital in the form of an instrument which 
aids production. Banking capital is thus a portion of the 
wealth of a community appropriated to this object. It renders 
a very important service. Yet the benefit it confers may all 
be resolved into the greater facility it furnishes for the transfer 
of values in the form of tools and machinery—materials and 
the means of sustenance—into one or other of which all capi- 
* 
tal must be brought in order to be made productive. The proper 
and legitimate business of a bank is to furnish just these facil¬ 
ities for the productive industry of the community in which it 
is located. When the banks of New York permit their funds 
to be absorbed in the gambling speculations of Wall street, 
they work mischief rather than benefit to productive in¬ 
dustry. The wealth represented by their capital-stock is with¬ 
drawn from production. It forms no part of capital in the true 
sense of the term. They are for the time, so far, turned into 
nothing better than faro-banks, mere reservoirs of wealth to be 
played with and shifted from hand to hand at the turning of 
cards. Wealth so absorbed can by no possibility come into 
union with labor. It is of the highest consequence to the clear 
