Thus there are practical limits set upon the quantity of "saving" which can be usefully effected by extending the interval between effort and enjoyment. If the right period be exceeded the risk and waste is too great. The analogy of gardening adduced by Ruskin is a sound one.[168] By due care and the sacrifice of bud after bud the gardener may increase the length of the stem and the size of the flower that may be produced. He may be said to be able to do this indefinitely, but if he is wise he knows that the increased risks of such extension, not to mention the sacrifice of earlier units of satisfaction, impose a reasonable limit upon the procrastination. The proportion of "saving" which may be and is applied to establish late-fructifying forms of wealth, differs not only with the different developments of the industrial arts, but with the foresight and moral character of the race and generation. As our species of civilisation advances, and the demand for complex luxuries and the arts of supplying them advance, a larger amount of "roundabout" production becomes possible, and as regard for the future generations advances, more capital will be put into forms which fructify for them. But at the present in any given community there is a rational and a necessary limit to the quantity of "saving" which can be applied to such purposes.
Secondly, we find that in fact the surplus "saving" over and above what is needed to provide the necessary forms of capital to assist in satisfying current consumption is not absorbed in making provision for distant future consumption by more "roundabout methods." Much of it goes into a mere increase of the number of existing forms of capital whose _raison d'être_ lies in the satisfaction of present or immediately future wants. The multiplication of cotton-spinning-mills, of paper-mills, of breweries, ironworks, has gone on far faster than the growth of current consumption. This increase of productive machinery has not in fact been able to force such an increase of consumption as gives adequate employment to these new forms of machinery and to the labour which is at hand to work them.
