Capital from an economic standpoint is that wealth which produces farther wealth, or simply aids to create farther wealth. A needle is capital, because it aids to |CAPITAL THIRD FACTOR OF WEALTH.| make a shirt that costs more than the material used for it. A sewing machine is capital of more effective kind than the needle used by hand, because it aids to produce more wealth than the tailor or the seamstress can produce without it. A lathe is capital, because it not only shapes the round forms of any material more accurately than |MACHINERY, TOOLS, ARTIFICIAL WEALTH.| the artizan would ever be able to make without it, but it greatly saves his time on every piece of the work; thus saving time it aids in producing more wealth. A factory, as a whole (including the building and machinery), is capital, because all the machinery, all tools and instruments used in it produce farther wealth from the raw materials, and serve as sources of income to the owner of this property. Under the care of the stock-raiser, cattle are capital, because they grow and multiply; but the meat or beef is utility, because it may be unproductively consumed.[[50]] Agricultural implements, as well as the fertilizers, like guano, phosphates and many others are capital, because they increase fertility and increase the produce of land, which makes a greater income in favor of its owner. A thousand different machineries and special instruments might be introduced here to show that each one of them has been invented for the purpose of aiding to create more wealth out of less wealth. And that all of them and every one, when used by an owner of wealth, is a definite source of income and of profit to him, because it aids his own skill and energy to obtain greater returns in exchange for his labor and mind, than he can obtain without it.

But the most effective factor in aiding to produce more wealth and a much greater income for an owner of wealth is the energy of steam or any other mechanical force, applicable to various forms of labor |MECHANICAL FORCE; INCREASE OF STEAM.| and completely obedient to the bidding of man. “Steam power has increased in the United States from 3½-millions, in 1860, to 17-millions horse power in 1895; while in Great Britain and Ireland it has increased from 2½- to 13-millions; Germany from ⅞- to 7⅔-millions, and in France from 1 to 5-millions horse-power. The increase of this capital has been most manifest in manufactures,” says Dr. Henderson.[[51]] But it should be remarked at once that no one of the families worth below $5,000 could apply these millions of horsepower of steam force upon their properties. This energy has all the time been a profitable source of great income in favor of the families that made the wealthiest group in the tables of statistics, whereas the others have had but little crumbs of its increase of wealth. The mechanical force, as every one knows, is in service of the capitalists.

But when we look into the limits of towns and cities, we find millions of rentable properties of all possible kinds; and every factory, |SOURCES OF INCOME.| every storehouse, every shop and every dwelling house there is a sure source of income to the propertied man. The very sweat-shops, where the working people can not, on an average, live longer than 28 years—even these dens of poison and pestilence are inexhaustible sources of income and profit to their owners.

As to the town and city lots, they are all sources of greater or less income to the men who own them. Whether these lots of land are occupied by |SOURCES OF INDIRECT INCOME.| anything or are remaining waste, makes little difference, because as the town population increases, their values also increase in proportion as the city population and its business increase; the owners of properties towards centers of the cities are usually bound to be rich out of the resources of rent. Even a simple house, somewhere about the marginal line of a city or town is usually a source of indirect income to its owner, because he and his family may have a comfortable shelter in it, without which they would pay the rent for another’s house,[[52]] and would carry on all other expenses of life, just as they do in their own house, in which they save the rental money for some other purposes of living.

Now then, whatever property you may think of—whether natural or artificial, whether animate or inanimate, that a person has possession of—it is always wealth, and a source of income in his favor. |WEALTH CREATED BY LABOR.| The natural wealth is the land, wherever it may be in convenient places, it may always provide one or more resources of income in exchange for the application and expense of strength or skill of labor upon it. The artificial wealth includes all capital, whatever it may be, it is capital, if it can assist the labor energy to double, triple or multiple the income and profit, drawn from the natural resource to which the labor-strength is applied. The rentable house or any other building is artificial wealth. And it is also a source of income to its owner who, by a use of skill and by an application of labor energy, can make his source of income give a multiple yield, in return for the expense of his personal strength upon it.

Thus, the indirect and direct resources of a propertied person, therefore, are always many and complete when he works out the wealth himself. |COMPLETE AND INCOMPLETE INCOMES OF PROPERTY OWNERS.| By complete I mean this, that whatever his intelligence and strength can draw out of the source they are applied to, it is always his and is always to his benefit. An incomplete income or yield from a source of wealth, to its owner, will be this, that, if he hires the energy, or the skill of another person to apply upon his property, then his income is incomplete, because he has to pay for the hired labor energy as well as for hired skill. In this way an owner of wealth of any kind may even divide the yield and the product of the source of income into halves.

But as long as a person is an owner of wealth, an owner of capital, and an owner of physical and mental energy, he is a possessor of |PROPERTY GUARANTY OF LIFE.| resources; his labor energy and his existence are then fully guaranteed for himself, his wife, and children by his wealth, because wealth or property becomes a direct source of income, when he himself labors on it, and an indirect, when he rents it to others. A propertied man, therefore, is safe forever by the resources of his property, which yield incomes and profits for sustenance of the highest possible life, highest education, freedom, and enjoyment.

But what about the propertyless man? How many resources, or how many sources of income |HAS THE PROPERTYLESS ANY SOURCE OF INCOME, ETC.?| has he for his own life, the life of his wife and children? What sources of income has he for education, for bread and butter, for clothes and dress, for their shelter and his own? What resources has he for his sustenance in this world, when the entire world tends rapidly to be the property of a very few persons?

He has neither land, nor capital, nor house; he has neither natural, nor artificial wealth to serve him, and hence, has not a single one of the above described sources of |THE PROPERTYLESS HIMSELF IS A SOURCE OF MULTIPLE EXPENSE.| income and profit which the Creator provided for man’s enjoyment. On the contrary, the propertyless man himself is a source of multiple expense; he has but a store of labor energy within himself, which store must be supported by its own effort, and that too while his life is guaranteed by nothing but by his physical strength and natural mind. And it is only these two that unite to support him who is the single source of the following manifold expenses in favor of many owners of properties and wealth, who sometimes make enormous fortunes by the efforts of the propertyless.

If a propertyless man desires to exist at all in the sight of his God in this quasi-civilized world, he must spend his life in the following ways: