industry in the widest sense of the word, including agriculture and
transport. Lately economists have shown a tendency to go back to the
wider application of the word, and an American economist, Dr Anderson,
who has just published a book on the Value of Money, goes so far
therein as to state that a "dollar is capital." The language of the
City generally uses the word in the narrow sense adopted by Mill, and
there is very much to be said for this view of the real meaning of
capital. Marbles to play with, houses to live in, motor-cars to go
joy-riding in--all these are assets which can be disposed of, and so,
in a sense, may be called capital. But the businesslike meaning of the
word is the tools and equipment of industry, because it is only by
their possession that the wealth of mankind not only increases man's
present enjoyment, but enhances his future output of the goods
necessary for his existence.

If we take the word in this sense it becomes at once apparent that the
theory is exaggerated which maintains that war is destroying capital,
so that capital will long be at a famine price. The extent to which
war is actually destroying the tools and equipment of industry is
quite limited. On the actual battlefield that sort of destruction
proceeds apace when factories are shelled into shapeless lumps of
bricks, and when the surface of the earth, that man's skill had
developed into great productive fertility, is torn into craters and
covered with rubbish. There is also rapid destruction of a very
important part of the equipment of industry owing to the submarine
campaign, which is sinking so many fine ships that were meant to
carry goods from one country to another. But, apart from this actual
destruction on the battlefield and on the sea, the tools and equipment
of industry over the greater part of the earth remain untouched. It is
true that, owing to the preoccupations of the war, not so much work