96 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
rofesses to have written for students of business, the more remote 
from actual business usage his conception of capital is likely to 
be. How long must it continue to be a sort of ritual for the writer 
f economic text books to at first repeat piously old definitions 
from which all vital meaning has departed (if they ever had any) 
nly to throw them aside later when the time comes to use them. 
Must every year the minds of thousands of beginning students 
of economics be crammed with this useless intellectual lumber? 
n what other field of study could such a practice continue? 
he way to consistency and clearness has been clearly shown 
by the labors.ot the past generation. Ambiguity must be 
anished from economic terminology. Wealth and capital are 
ot the same or even related as genus and species. Capital is 
essentially an individual acquisitive, financial, investment owner- 
hip concept. It is not coextensive with wealth as physical 
bjects, but rather with legal rights as claims to uses and incomes. 
t is or should be a concept relating unequivocably to private 
property and to the existing price system. Social capital is but a 
mischievous name for national wealth. The so-called, misnamed, 
“interest problem” is not to be conceived of as correlated with a 
arrow class of artificial goods but rather as the time-value 
element permeating all cases of valuation of groups of uses differ- 
ing in time. The admission of these and a number of logically 
i: truths is partially, haltingly, inconsistently implied in 
much of the current treatment of the fundamentals. When will 
it be made frankly and clearly? When will the dead hand of 
Ricardianism be lifted from our economic texts? 
John Bates Clark in his young manhood struck straight and 
telling blows for a newer, truer and more realistic conception of 
distributive theory. He did not attain an ultimate goal, but he: 
advanced in the right direction, showing the way to us. The 
sincerest tribute that we, and that men of younger generations, 
can render to him is to seek and to find the truths implicit in the 
work of the notable era of which he was so large a part