revenue, and is upon that account the shortest and best expression of its
value. But the amount of the metal pieces which circulate in a society, can
never be equal to the revenue of all its members. As the same guinea which
pays the weekly pension of one man to-day, may pay that of another
to-morrow, and that of a third the day thereafter, the amount of the metal
pieces which annually circulate in any country, must always be of much less
value than the whole money pensions annually paid with them. But the power
of purchasing, or the goods which can successively be bought with the whole
of those money pensions, as they are successively paid, must always be
precisely of the same value with those pensions ; as must likewise be the
revenue of the different persons to whom they are paid. That revenue,
therefore, cannot consist in those metal pieces, of which the amount is so
much inferior to its value, but in the power of purchasing, in the goods
which can successively be bought with them as they circulate from hand to
hand.

Money, therefore, the great wheel of circulation, the great instrument of
commerce, like all other instruments of trade, though it makes a part, and a
very valuable part, of the capital, makes no part of the revenue of the
society to which it belongs; and though the metal pieces of which it is
composed, in the course of their annual circulation, distribute to every man
the revenue which properly belongs to him, they make themselves no part of
that revenue.

Thirdly, and lastly, the machines and instruments of trade, etc. which
compose the fixed capital, bear this further resemblance to that part of the
circulating capital which consists in money; that as every saving in the
expense of erecting and supporting those machines, which does not diminish
the introductive powers of labour, is an improvement of the neat revenue of
the society ; so every saving in the expense of collecting and supporting