Section 8 What Is Capital?
What is capital? Is1 it what a man has? Is2 it counted (App. § 31) by3 pounds and pence, stocks4 and shares5, by houses and lands6? No! Capital7 is not what a man has, but what a man is. Character8 is9 capital; honour10 is capital.—Rev. Dr. Macduff.
Notes
1 ‘Is — has?’ say ‘Does it consist in that which (see S. 3, N. 7) we possess?’ The prep. ‘in’ here governs the dat. Read again S. 4, N. 5, B, and notice that, when the demonstrative pronouns ‘that’ and ‘those’ are followed by a relative pronoun, they cannot be rendered by the adverb ‘da’ in combination with a preceding preposition; as—
We laughed at that which (or at what) you told us. Wir lachten über das, was Sie uns erzählten.
2 See S. 2, N. 1; ‘to count’, here schätzen.
3 by = nach.
4 Wertpapiere.
5 Aktien.
6 Ländereien.
7 ‘Capital — is’. The literal translation of this sentence would read very awkwardly in German, say ‘Our capital does not consist in that which we possess, but (S. 6, N. 10) in that which we are.’
8 Character = A good reputation.
9 ‘is’, here ist.
10 Ehrenhaftigkeit, f.