penitentiary. The dark cell is almost always found sufficient to subdue the prisoners; the power of flogging is reserved, but scarcely ever used.* The mortality scarcely exceeds one per cent., and a passage full of instruction from the inspector's report is well worthy of especial note: "That State prisons have sometimes shown a self-supporting ability is not so remarkable; but that the inmates of an establishment like the Albany Penitentiary, composed of the vilest dregs of society, the rakings of the gutter and the brothel, the profligate, and even the diseased, more fit for a hospital than the workhouse, destitute, half-naked, and sentenced often for a term scarcely sufficient to work off the last debauch, who must be fed and nursed, and sent forth again, perhaps, in a few days fully clothed,-that such a class so circumstanced can be managed in such a way as to rid the community from the burthen of their maintenance is certainly a wonderful achievement in political economy." The value of this testimony is increased from the fact that the shortness of the sentences imposed on a large proportion of the prisoners in county gaols is represented as an invincible barrier to their instruction and their reformation under our system of prison discipline, and thus much ought to be conceded to the objectors; that committals for short periods, and the repetition of such committals, serve rather to harden than to deter or to reform; that such short sentences reduce the means of teaching trades by which honest labour might provide means of support when the imprisonment terminates, and do not enable the convict to acquire habits of industry. The statistics of the Albany Penitentiary show that an enormous proportion of the crimes committed are traceable to drunkenness, and thoroughly confirm the observations made in reference to the prevalence of the vice among European Christian communities.

The purpose of this paper is rather to present for consideration some contrasted facts, than to collect the multitudinous statistics connected with prison discipline and its results. I am deeply sensible I am only making a fragmentary and imperfect contribution towards the solution of a very grave question of social interest.

* See "History of the Albany Penitentiary." By David Dyer, chaplain (Albany, 1867): a volume equally interesting and instructive. Due honour is paid to the deservings of Amos Pilsbury, the superintendent of the estab† Page 143.

ment.

WHAT IS CAPITAL?

BY W. B. HODGSON, LL.D.

No words need explanation more than many that are in constant and familiar use. Words of rare occurrence call for and commonly receive an interpretation when they happen to be employed, and their first impression is then clear, sharp, and more or less accurate. But words that we have heard and uttered daily, it may be oftener, from our childhood, we take for granted that we understand, and, further, that others accept them in the same sense as that which to us they bear. In both these respects we are liable to err. Our own notions of their meaning are not unlikely to be confused, indistinct, and mixed up with what is irrelevant, if not false; while to others they may suggest ideas widely differing from ours, and yet not on that account the more correct. Without illustrating this position by examples that might easily be given, I may say that CAPITAL (to which, in spite of its name, I see that the printer of your programme has refused a capital C) is a word much more freely than accurately used; and that many fallacies cluster round it which it is very important should be removed, or, at least, as far as possible, abated. I shall make no apology, therefore, for being more elementary in my statement than, on many other subjects, would be seemly or needful in an Association of this kind.

Capital is frequently defined, and I accept the definition, to be that part of wealth which, instead of being at once consumed, (as wine is when it is drunk,) is reserved for the purpose of future production. The seed-corn of the farmer is roughly an example of Capital in one of its forms as distinguished from wheat which is made into bread, and in that form is consumed. Waiving the objection to which this example is fairly open, and to which I may ere long return, let me say that this definition obviously suggests two other questions 1st, What is wealth? 2nd, What is production?

First, What is wealth? As I heard Mr. Ruskin not a fortnight ago complain that economists confound wealth with money, I am required to declare that invariably, so far as I know, economists understand by wealth those almost infinitely various material substances which, being more or less in one way or other the result of human labour, and having more or less of value in exchange, minister to the necessities, the comforts, or the refinements of human life. Food, and houses, and horses, and cattle, and steam-engines, and pictures, and innumerable things besides, are all wealth. Money is wealth only potentially, because in exchange for it can be obtained any of those things which really constitute wealth. To the individual among individuals, or to a nation among nations, money is wealth in a secondary and figurative sense. By this I mean not merely, though this also is true, that the metals of which money is usually composed may be melted and employed for various purposes of use or ornament, but that potentially they are wealth from their capacity of being converted into, or, more strictly, of being exchanged for real wealth. Language is much more commonly and subtly metaphorical than the multitude know or suspect. The Lancashire workman who, being urged to save his earnings, replied, "I puts my money down my neck, and gets the good of it," little thought that his words were boldly figurative; yet he could not deny that it was not the silver shillings that he swallowed, but the beef, the bread, and, perhaps still more, the beer for which he gave those shillings in exchange. Just so in other cases. But to Robinson Crusoe coins were not wealth, because nothing that he wished for could they enable him to obtain. Without money wealth may still exist abundantly, though its exchange from hand to hand would be much more difficult, and laborious, and slow, and rare. On the other hand, money would of itself neither feed, nor clothe, nor lodge any one, nor minister to any of the thousand wants that wealth supplies.

The second question-What is production? is much more difficult to answer. Adam Smith's definition of production expressly excludes from the title of productive labourers not only opera-singers and ballet-dancers, but domestic servants, teachers, clergymen, physicians, and a host besides. According to this view the tailor who makes a coat is productive, the servant who brushes it is unproductive. Nay, as has been well observed by Mr. P. Stirling in his Philosophy of Trade, the artizan who makes a violin is productive, the artist who plays upon it is unproductive; the masons and

carpenters and others who build a church are productive, the parson who preaches in it is unproductive; the butcher who kills an ox and cuts the flesh into joints is productive, the physician who saves a human life is unproductive. Nevertheless, no less a man than Mr. J. S. Mill adheres to Adam Smith's distinction, while he freely grants the title of useful labourers to those to whom he fancies he is in strictness obliged to deny the title of productive. Now, in order to evade this controversy, which you may think is a dispute about terms, rather than about things or ideas, let us here confine our view to those forms of production to which all alike freely concede that term; I mean material products, whether the stages through which they pass on their way to completion be few or many, easy or difficult, slow or rapid, simple or complex. The grazier breeds a sheep; from its back the wool is shorn; it is subjected to a succession of various sorts of treatment which I need not enumerate, until it is made into cloth, and the cloth is made into garments for human use. At each stage, in economic phrase, a value is added; and the value of the finished product is, or ought to be, the aggregate of all the values progressively added by the previous processes, all separately and collectively productive.

Now in this, and in all other similar cases, what is the part that Capital plays? A short analysis will, I hope, make this clear. In order that a man or a set of men should work productively, what things are indispensable? First, he or they must have the means of living while they are at work. No man lives or can live literally on the produce of what he is then making, but on the produce of what he or some one else has previously made. No man can live on the grain of the next coming harvest while he is cultivating the ground in hope of the future crop. No man can be clothed in the garment he is then making any more than by the wool that is still on the sheep's back. No man can be lodged in the house of which the building has just begun. He must have the means of subsistence (which it is a serious, though common, mistake to identify with mere food) provided in advance, if not by himself, then by some other who is able and willing to anticipate for him the result of the labour actually in progress. Now, in actual practice, this provision in advance of the subsistence of the labourer is called the wages fund. It is not necessary, and most assuredly not desirable, that wages should be limited to the bare means of subsistence, but they must at the very least amount to and supply the means of subsistence. Without these, no one

will, no one can work. "To live working or to die fighting' was the cry at Parisian barricades. "As well starve idle as starve busy" is the cry natural to humanity itself. It is very desirable that the workman should himself possess a sufficient and even an ample share of the means of subsistence; but, in the event of his failing, from whatever cause, to possess them, is it or is it not for his benefit that there should be others, and as many others as possible, able and willing to make for him the indispensable advance? If a man has no store of food, is it for his benefit that others should be able and willing to advance to him food, or the means of purchasing food? If a man has no house or cottage of his own, is it or is it not well for him that others should be willing and able to lend him a dwelling on the understanding that its use will be paid for hereafter out of the produce of the labour still incomplete, it may be not yet begun? The payment of wages in the form of money ought not to, though it often does, hide the true nature of the transaction. Wages may be paid wholly in money or wholly in kind, or partly in kind and partly in money. The lawyer receives his wages, which he calls fees, wholly in money. The clerk receives his wages, which he calls salary, wholly in money. The female domestic servant receives her wages partly in money, but chiefly in food and lodging. The male domestic servant receives his wages partly in money, but chiefly in food and lodging and also clothes, so-called livery. A gardener may receive his wages partly in money, partly in lodging, and not at all in either food or clothes. These and any number of such varieties in detail do not touch the great fact that real wages in every case are not to be estimated in money, but in the abundance or scarcity of those things for which the money must be exchanged, or which take the place of money. A man may have higher money wages and less real wages than before, and vice versa. Lastly, for I must not here enlarge, every man engaged in producing the means of subsistence is really, though he may not think of it or know it, helping to swell the fund which is to pay not merely his own, but others' labour. Every such labourer is therefore directly and strongly interested in the productiveness of the industry of every other such labourer. Every such labourer who is idle in the production or wasteful in the consumption of the means of subsistence, pro tanto lessens the common fund for the remuneration of industry. The first form of Capital, then, is the means for the subsistence of the producer, or, in ordinary phrase, the wages fund.