Now if there is one thing which in our discussion of the Free Trade problem we have attempted to demonstrate more fully than another, it is that there is something more in an engine or a machine than the money spent on its separate materials and on the putting of them together. There are besides, the economic powers of Nature which play through the engine, or the machine, when once it is made; and these economic powers are added as a free gift over and above the maintenance of the workmen when engaged in making it and keeping it in repair, - economic powers which if we take a steam engine, for example, will do for its capitalist-owner the work of a hundred men, say, for each man employed in making it, repairing it, and supplying it with fuel; and what is more, will continue to give him this surplus as a free gift so long as the engine lasts; in the same way as a charge of gunpowder when used for purposes of blasting, contains a thousand times the quantity of pure economic labour-power that is bought in the work of the labourers who supply the saltpetre, charcoal, and sulphur, of which it is composed.

It is only the economic powers of Man which can be got out of the food and maintenance of the labourers while they are at work, and not what in this volume we have distinguished as powers of Nature; and these economic powers of Man, without the use of machinery to help them, practically 'eat their own heads off' economically speaking. So that to have made his argument consistent, Jevons ought to have made his engine keep his labourers not only while they were making it, but - allowing for repairing, running, and stoking it - as long as it lasted. Or to be still more precise, he ought to have made it keep them and their heirs for ever, just as it would be in the case of the interest of a money loan, inasmuch as with a portion of this free gift of economic power set apart as a sinking fund to replace the engine itself when it was altogether worn out, the capitalist could supply another ready to take its place, and yet another, and another, and so on ad infinitum. But were he to do this, where does Jevons imagine that either the interest or the profits of the capitalist would come from? And would the capitalist then be so anxious to get hold of that engine? I suspect not.

But as the capitalist, when once the engine is made, has only to employ, say, a single labourer to repair it and keep it in running order, and perhaps another to supply the coal for stoking it, out of the hundred he had to pay for making it, we begin to see where his interest and his profits come from, namely out of the surplus of economic powers of Nature which the machine now yields him as a free gift; precisely as it is out of the powers of Nature in the soil that the farmer gets the surplus which will enable him to pay both the wages of his labourers and the rent of his landlord.

Indeed, as the game of Industry is money-getting, one shrewdly suspects that if the use of capital, as Jevons thinks, is to keep the labourers while they are at work on making any machine or instrument of production, the object of the capitalist in using it, is to enable him to capture through the machines those economic powers of Nature which will yield him a margin of 'surplus labour ' for nothing at all. It is true, of course, that the competition of rival owners of like machines will, by the cutting down of the prices of the products, hand over a large part of this free gift of labour-power to the general public who buy the products of these machines. The reason they are not obliged to hand over the whole of it will be seen later on; but in the meantime what we have to note is, that Jevons, by grinding down 'fixed capital' into 'circulating capital,' and both alike into the money-wages paid the labourers while engaged on any given industrial undertaking, instead of improving the Science by giving it, as he imagined, a greater unity, was in reality merely mixing and confounding its categories; and that this, which his followers hailed as an advance, was actually a retrogression.

For even Mill and Ricardo, whom they threw overboard for Jevons, saw that there was a distinction somewhere between 'fixed' and 'circulating' capital, although by not seeing clearly precisely where it lay, they got off the track and lost their way when they came to apply it. Indeed, the orthodox Economists have all along seen the difference between 'fixed' and 'circulating' capital in the case of Land, and have recognized that the 'surplus product' from which all concerned with it are paid, comes from the powers of Nature yielded as a free gift by the soil; but they have been slow to see that it is precisely the same with machinery, where the powers of Nature involved are in the form of steam, electricity, etc., instead of soil. Karl Marx, too, saw that there was a 'surplus value' to be got somewhere out of machine production, but not seeing that it came out of the machine itself, - that is to say the inventor of the machine, - and not out of the money capital of the capitalist or the work of the labourer, he ruined his theory of Political Economy as a system, by arguing that this 'surplus value' must come out of the work of the labourer alone, whom he chooses to represent as having been 'exploited' by the capitalist.