Page:Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Riches by Anne Turgot.djvu/125

98 upon borrowed funds run great risk of failing. But, although capitals are partly formed by saving from the profits of the working classes, yet, as these profits always come from the earth,—inasmuch as they are all paid, either from the revenue, or as part of the expenditure which serves to produce the revenue,—it is evident that capitals come from the land just as much as the revenue does; or, rather, that they are nothing but the accumulation of the part of the values produced by the land that the proprietors of the revenue, or those who share it with them, can lay by every year without using it for the satisfaction of their wants.

S101
Although money is the immediate subject of saving, and is, so to speak, the first material of capitals when they are being formed, specie forms but an almost inappreciable part of the sum total of capitals.

We have seen that money plays scarcely any part in the sum total of existing capitals; but it plays a great part in the formation of capitals. In fact, almost all savings are made in nothing but money; it is in money that the revenues come to the proprietors, that the advances and the profits return to undertakers of every kind; it is, therefore, from money that they save, and the annual increase of capitals takes place in money: but none of the undertakers make any other use of it than to convert it immediately into the different kinds of effects upon which their