Those which we will consider first are the products of organic nature, which have been dwelt upon by a well-known writer as showing us the ultimate source of industrial interest generally, and also at the same time its natural and essential justice.  It may be a surprise to some to learn who this writer is.  He is Henry George, who is best known to the public as the advocate of a measure of confiscation so crude and so arbitrary, that even socialists have condemned it as impracticable without serious modifications.  Henry George, however, although he outdid most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular kind—­that is to say, the rent of land—­was equally vehement in his defence of the interest of industrial capital.  Socialists say—­and the aphorism is constantly repeated—­“A man can get an income only by working or stealing; there is no third way.”  In answer to this, it was pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events—­and we may add that here we have wealth in its oldest form—­consists of possessions yielding a natural increase, which has been neither made by the possessors, nor yet stolen by them from anybody else.  That is to say, it consists of flocks and herds.  A shepherd or herdsman starts with a single pair of animals, from which parents there arises a large progeny.  This living increment has not been produced by the man, but it is still more obvious that it has not been produced by his neighbours, and it therefore belongs in justice to the man who owns the parents.  George pointed out also that whole classes of possessions besides are, for by far the larger part of their value, equally independent either of corresponding work or of theft.  Among such possessions are wines, whose quality improves with time, and which, if sold to-day, may be worth tenpence a bottle, but which four years hence may be worth perhaps half-a-crown.  In all such cases—­this was George’s contention—­we have some possession originally small to start with, which year by year is increased in amount or at least in value, not by the efforts of the possessor, but by the secret operations of nature.  Here, he argued, we have capital in its typical form; and interest is the gift of nature to the man by whom the capital is owned.

George, however, is constrained to supplement this proposition by another.  Though he assumes that of the products which are, in the modern world, actually paid as interest by the borrower of capital to the owners of it, the larger part consists of gifts of unaided nature, he admits that they are not the whole.  He admits that a part of it is paid for the use of machinery.  Now, such interest, he says, has a definitely different origin, and cannot intrinsically be justified in the same way; and if all wealth consisted of such commodities as are due to the efforts of man, and to the man-made machinery which assists him, all interest would be really, as it is said to be by some, indefensible.  But, he continues, since interest