CLARK'S REFORMULATION OF THE CAPITAL CONCEPT 139 
(from Rieardo, J. S. Mill and Sydney Webb) and in three 
approving, (A. Smith, S. N. Patten, and Clark's co-worker, 
Giddings). The sources or the starting points of Clark’s own 
thought must be sought more widely in the circumstances of his 
life and of his surroundings. 
The first possibility might seem to be close at hand in the 
fact that Clark was an American. A scholarly study has recently 
shown * that with few exceptions writers on economics in the 
United States from Raymond in 1820 to Perry in 1877 (including 
Phillips, Wayland, Vethake, M. Wilson, Cordoza, Tucker, Carey, 
and Amasa Walker) defined capital as privately owned means of 
production, emphasized its valuation or price aspect, and included 
land among the concrete goods in which this value was embodied. 
Some of the exceptions serve to prove the rule, for these exceptions 
were men of English training or faithful disciples drawing their 
ideas directly from Ricardian text books. Such unorthodox views 
arose naturally in America where were lacking the artificial 
feudal legal limitations upon the sale of land, and where land- 
holders were not marked off socially from capitalist merchants as 
a separate class. Here land was readily bought and sold and 
was from the earliest settlement the chief object of investment 
with a view to speculative profit. This environment had 
prompted one American writer after another (apparently without 
mutual influence) to develop conceptions radically different from 
those of the English school. It might have likewise prompted 
Clark quite independently to his very similar thought. And 
there were particular circumstances at the time Clark was writ- 
ing, namely, the active discussion of Henry George's single tax 
proposal, which undoubtedly had directed Clark’s attention 
strongly to this problem of the capital concept. Of this, more 
later. 
But if Clark got this thought either directly or indirectly from 
American economists, it is not evident in his writings. The 
generation of young economists who in the seventies and early 
eighties brought a new spirit into American economic studies, 
did not develop the indigenous traditions, but unfortunately 
neglected them and turned to Germany for the new sources of 
their inspiration. At the same time there was in some quarters 
*J. R. Turner, The Ricardian Rent Theory in Early American Eco- 
nomics, 1921.