We are now beginning to see what the nature of Capital is, and what the motives are for employing it. In the production of commodities Capital is always something that makes easier to the producers the getting ready to sell and the selling of future commodities. The capital always spares more or less of onerous and irksome human exertion. It always mediates between some free force of Nature and some otherwise more onerous effort of men. The sole motive to employ capital in any one or in all of its multitudinous forms from the simplest to the most complex is to throw off upon the ever-willing shoulders of Nature some part of the irksome effort that would otherwise come to the easily-wearied muscles of men. Nature is "good," to use a commercial term, for all she can be made to carry of men's work, through implements devised and machinery contrived to apply, to commodities in every stage of their transformation and transportation till the last, the ever-present potencies of this physical world. These potencies cost nothing. The implements and machinery cost much in present labor and previously created capital. The ultimate sale of commodities must make return for all the forms of capital employed in their production, in the shape of Profits, the reward of _abstinence_; and for all the forms of direct labor employed in their production, in the shape of Wages, the reward of personal _effort_.
The beaver gnaws down the tree with his teeth from generation to generation in precisely the same manner; but man is a being more nobly endowed than the beaver, and no sooner had he occasion to fell trees, than something of the nature of an axe suggested itself to his ingenuity. It is true, that his earliest attempts at axe-making were probably of the rudest sort, but just as soon as anything was devised, whether of flint or shell or metal, that rendered easier the felling of a tree, Capital made a beginning along that line of obstacles. Our chief interest in studying the implements of the successive so-called Ages of Stone and Bronze and Iron, is to witness the increasing degrees of ingenuity displayed by those pre-historic men. Among the more gifted races, progress in this direction was perhaps more rapid than we are wont to think it was, since Tubal-Cain, the first artificer of record, is said to have "_hammered all kinds of implements out of copper and iron_" (Gen. iv, 22). Lucretius, writing in the century before the Christian era, put down the following lines in vigorous Latin, as translated by Mason Good:--