128 NATURE OF CAPITAL AND INCOME [Cmar. VII 
proper to regard it as outgo in the case of each single house; 
for the income account of the total mass of the commu- 
nity’s capital is simply the combined accounts of the 
individual elements. We cannot consistently do other- 
wise than regard all costs, whether recurrent or not, as 
outgo. 
In actual business there are usually many articles of 
the same kind, so that it is seldom necessary to reckon the 
net income from each individual article. Such articles may 
be conveniently lumped together. This we have just seen 
in the case of the houses of the loan association. As an- 
other example we may take the stock-in-trade of a mer- 
chant. This stock yields him income, not, as in the case 
of the house, by rent, but by sale; the difference between 
rent and sale being simply that rent consists of a series of 
contributions to income, whereas sale consists only of one. 
A stock of stoves, just as a stock of houses, yields income 
which is the sum of the net incomes from its individual 
constituents. But the stove dealer would find the book- 
keeping very troublesome were he to reckon in a separate 
account the net income from each individual stove which 
he buys and sells. He reaches the same final result for 
his stock as a whole (or rather, for each specific category 
of articles in his stock) by taking from his gross receipts 
obtained by selling stoves the year’s cost of replenishing 
his stock, the rent of his warehouse, salaries of clerks, and 
other outgo. Were he to arrive at this result by applying 
the same process to each individual stove, the individual 
results would, of course, vary widely; for a stove left over 
from last year (and therefore free from any item of cost 
in this year’s accounts), if sold this year, would give a 
large net income, while another stove, bought this year, 
but not sold until next, would only have debit items in 
this year’s account. But the sum of these irregular 
incomes from individual parts of the merchant’s stock 
will give a steady income for the whole.