Book II: Chapter 2 - Page 2

real wealth, too, is in proportion, not to their gross,
but to their neat revenue.

The whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital must evidently be
excluded from the neat 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 labour necessary for
fashioning those materials into the proper form, can ever make any part of
it. The price of that labour 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 labour, 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, conveniencies, and amusements,
are augmented by the labour of those workmen.

The intention of the fixed capital is to increase the productive powers of
labour, or to enable the same number of labourers 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 labourers and labouring cattle will raise a much greater produce,
than in one of equal extent and equally good ground, but not furnished with
equal conveniencies. In manufactures, the same number of hands, assisted
with the best machinery, will work up a much greater quantity of goods than
with more imperfect instruments of trade. The expense which is properly laid
out upon a fixed capital of any kind, is always repaid with great profit,
and increases the annual produce by a much greater value than that of the
support which such improvements require. This support, however, still
requires a certain portion of that produce. A certain quantity of materials,
and the labour of a certain number of workmen, both of which might have been
immediately employed to augment the food, clothing, and lodging, the
subsistence and conveniencies of the society, are thus diverted to another
employment, highly advantageous indeed, but still different from this one.
It is upon this account that all such improvements in mechanics, as enable
the same number of workmen to perform an equal quantity of work with cheaper
and simpler machinery than had been usual before, are always regarded as
advantageous to every society. A certain quantity of materials, and the
labour of a certain number of workmen, which had before been employed in
supporting a more complex and expensive machinery, can afterwards be applied
to augment the quantity of work which that or any other machinery is useful
only for performing. The undertaker of some great manufactory, who employs a
thousand a-year in the