Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 04.djvu/212

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CAPILLARITY. 174 CAPITAL. density of the liquid, and g is the acceleration of a falling body. (See Hydrostatics.) Hence, pgh = 2T/r , 2T or ft = ■ — pyr where r is the radius of the tube at the point at the top of the column of water, because, strictly speaking, r is the radius of the spherical concave surface of the water, and this equals the radius of the tube at this point if the liquid wets the tube. Therefore, it is entirely immaterial what the radius of the tube is at other points below; the heiglit li remains the same. l-"or most interesting and instructive descrip- tions of capillar}' phenomena, consult Boys, Soap Bubbles, and How to Blow Them (New York, 1900). CAPISTRANO, kii'pe-stra'nS, Giovanni (c.l38U-14.3li) . An Italian monk, commander against the Turks. He was born at Capistrano, in the Abruzzi. In his early manhood he pursued the practice of the civil and canon law in Naples. In 1410 Capistrano entered the Franciscan Order, and soon attained prominence through the fiery zeal he displayed against non-believers and here- tics. He was sent, in 1450, as Papal delegate to C^rmany to preach against the Hussites and to urge a crusade against the Turks, who tlircatened western Europe. While in Germany he instigated a persecution against the Jews of Silesia. Hav- ing failed in his efforts to imite the German princes in a crusade against the Turks, he col- lected an army of 60,000 men, which he led into Hungary to the relief of Belgrade, then besieged by tiie Turks (1450)'. He led the inhabitants in tiiree successful sorties, cross in hand. He died as a result of his exertions during the siege, and was canonized in 1724, by Benedict XIII. See HuxyADY, J.ixos. CAPITAINE FRACASSE, ka'pe'tan' fra'- kas' (Fr., Captain Hurly-Burly) , Le. A roman- tic novel by Thcophile Gautier, published in Paris in 1803, but begun in the author's early manhood. It narrates the adventures of a young man of good family, named De Sigognac, who enters a comiiany of itinerant actors and adopts the title name of the book as his pseudonym. CAPITAL (Lat. capiiellum, dim. of caput, head). The head or top member of a column, jiier, pilaster, etc., when treated as separate from the shaft. For the history and different types of the capital, sec Column. CAPITAL (Fr. capital, Med. Lat. cajntala, from Lat. capitalis, pertaining to the head, from caput, head; for the origin of the meaning cf. principal, in the sense of capital). In political economy, the money, or the property convertible into money, with which a trader carries on his business. Adam Smith defined it as "that part cf a man's stock which he expects to convert into revenue." In the wider sense in which the term is employed in political economy, it indicates wealth set ai)art for j)urposes of production. In this latter acceptation it is sometimes regarded as the produce of past labor stored up and ap- plied to the maintenance of future labor. This view, however, is not altogether correct, l)ecause any body of wealth may be employed as capital, and wealth is not always the result of labor. Thus if a diamond be accidentally found and then sold by its possessor and its produce applied to production, capital has come into existence without further labor than was incidental to the picking up of the stone. Capital is said to be the result of abstinence, since its existence im- plies that the owner of a certain amount of wealth abstains from the unprofital)le consmnp- tion of it in order to consume productively, that is in such a waj* that it shall reproduce itself. But if it reproduce no more tlian itself there would be no incentive to the possessor to abstain from the consumption of it in his own personal gratification. Consequently he expects a reward for his self-denial. This reward is termed inter- est, being the remuneration for the use of capital and arising from the fact that the owner foregoes an immediate gratification or surrenders to an- other an essential agent of production. Wlierever something is withheld from immediate consump- tion, and made to serve in future production, there is capital. An important fact in the history of capital in modern civilized countries is its constant in- crease and the consequent lowering of the rate of interest. Capital is, with land and labor, a re- quisite in the production of wealth, for without some wealth stored up for the subsistence of la- bor a community could never ailvance beyond the hand-to-mouth stage of production. In the older school of economists there was no distinction made between the capitalist and the entrepreneur or employer of labor. According to these econo- mists, the capitalist received ])rofits, including not only interest on cai)ital. but compensation for risk and wages of superintendence. Modern writers consider the share of the capitalist mere- ly as the interest on his capital and limit the term profits to the remuneration of the entre- preneur. Belief in the so-called antagonism be- tween labor and capital has been fostered by the writings of the old economists, who held the vi(?w that a certain fixed fund, called the wage fund, was set apart by certain economic forces for the payment of labor, and that during a definite period this fund could not be increased. From this it apjiearcd that the interest of the laborer was of necessity opposed to that of his capitalist employer. The demolition of the old wage fund theory and the establishment of the doctrine that wages are paid out of product has done much to remove the misapprehension con- cerning this hostility between the two factors of production. Capital may be divided into three elements, subsistence, tools, and material, the first of course being the primary and most essential. An- other division is into fixed and circulating ea])i- tal, the former being that wbicli is tied up in plant, that is, buildings, maeliinery, etc., and the latter being tluit portion which is turned over in the course of trade, as in the payment of wages and in the jiurchase of goods wliieli are soon to be sold again. The concentration of a large amount of fixed capital is one of tlic rea- sons which ol)Struct the operation of the law that capital flows into its most ])roduetive chan- nel, for it is obvious that wealth of this sort can- not be readily aiqdied to other purposes and that its owner will prefer to go on selling for a time at a loss rather than to sacrifice his property by suddenly tlirowing his plant upon the market. Concentration is the characteristic of the pres- ent industrial system. In the light of what has been said it must l>e evident that this is not necessarily a concentration of capital, or in the