ABSTRACT
The human agent of industry must be provided with pre-existing products; without which their agency, however skilful and intelligent, would never be put in motion. The products necessity for the subsistence of the industrious agent, as long as the agent is occupied in completing their share of the work or production. Money distributed through the whole mechanism of human industry, like the oil that greases the wheels of complex machinery, gives the requisite ease and facility to its movements. But gold and silver are not productive unless employed by industry: they are like the oil in a machine remaining in a state of inaction. The merchant, the manufacturer, the cultivator, commonly have the least considerable portion of the value composing their capital invested in the form of money; nay, the more active their concern is, the smaller is their relative proportion of their capital so vested to the residue.
