Page:The wealth of nations, volume 1.djvu/406

 comprehends the whole annual produce of their land and labor; the net revenue, what remains free to them after deducting the expense of maintaining; first, their fixed; and, secondly, their circulating capital; or what, without encroaching upon their capital, they can place in their stock reserved for immediate consumption, or spend upon their subsistence, conveniences, and amusements. Their real wealth, too, is in proportion, not to their gross, but to their net revenue.

The whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital, must evidently be excluded from the net revenue of the society. Neither the materials necessary for supporting their useful machines and instruments of trade, their profitable buildings, etc., nor the produce of the labor necessary for fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever make any part of it. The price of that labor may, indeed, make a part of it; as the workmen so employed may place the whole value of their wages in their stock reserved for immediate consumption. But in other sorts of labor, both the price and the produce go to this stock, the price to that of the workmen, the produce to that of other people, whose subsistence, conveniences, and amusements, are augmented by the labor of those workmen.

The intention of the fixed capital is to increase the productive powers of labor, or to enable the same number of laborers to perform a much greater quantity of work. In a farm where all the necessary buildings, fences, drains, communications, etc., are in the most perfect good order, the same number of laborers and laboring cattle will raise a much greater produce, than in one of equal extent and equally good ground, but not furnished with equal conveniences. In manufactures the same number of hands,