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 maintenance of his machinery, if he can reduce this
expense to five hundred, will naturally employ the other five hundred in
purchasing an additional quantity of materials, to he wrought up by an
additional number of workmen. The quantity of that work, therefore, which
his machinery was useful only for performing, will naturally be augmented,
and with it all the advantage and conveniency which the society can derive
from that work.

The expense of maintaining the fixed capital in a great country, may very
properly be compared to that of repairs in a private estate. The expense of
repairs may frequently be necessary for supporting the produce of the
estate, and consequently both the gross and the neat rent of the landlord.
When by a more proper direction, however, it can be diminished without
occasioning any diminution of produce, the gross rent remains at least the
same as before, and the neat rent is necessarily augmented.

But though the whole expense of maintaining the fixed capital is thus
necessarily excluded from the neat revenue of the society, it is not the
same case with that of maintaining the circulating capital. Of the four