144 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
to be “a form of investment neither more nor less lucrative than 
others.” On the ethics of confiscation Clark concludes that 
morally as well as legally “pure capital when invested in land, 
has the same rights that elsewhere belong to it.” And as to con- 
fiscating all land values by the single tax, he exclaims: “would 
it be robbery? No; it would be the quintessence of robbery.” 
Two years later at the “Single Tax debate” at Saratoga, Clark 
developed in a very interesting way his ideas of pure capital as 
seeking investment in whatever form the State has said it may 
take. He sees it as a policy of expediency for the public welfare 
in the long run. The State “has said that it [capital] may go 
into land. For ends of its own it has so decided; and the ends 
are good.” 
But Clark felt that he had got hold of a deeper truth, more 
than a mere argument on a current issue. This monograph repre- 
sents in most respects a completely new start toward a sys- 
tematic theory of distribution which has little in common with 
his views in The Philosophy of Wealth, excepting “effective 
utility” (the marginal principle). It is needless to restate the 
argument of this well-nigh classical essay. Though brief, it 1s 
rich in ideas, and any one who has not read it will be well repaid 
by its careful study. 
But read to-day, even by the most friendly critic, the argu- 
ment reveals certain defects, partly arising out of its original 
polemical impulse, and partly due to the influence of the older 
conceptions upon Clark’s thought. As to the latter, traces of the 
labor theory of value remain in the confusion between the process 
of evaluating “concrete instruments,” including natural land, 
and the “personal sacrifices incurred in the service of society” 
in bringing concrete instruments into existence. When “the fruit 
of twenty years of labor” is exchanged for a piece of unimproved 
land, the value in the land is declared to embody “the fruit of 
personal sacrifice” of the buyer." But whence came the value of 
the land before it was sold? Again, though including the most 
imperishable land among the things which embody pure capital, 
Clark sees the “concrete forms of capital” as constantly vanish- 
ing. “The bodily tissue of capital lives by destruction and 
replacement.” In truth, Clark had not developed a consistent 
L Op. cit., pp. 55, 60. 
LE 
a