Here, however, we shall be met with two important objections.  In the first place, it will no doubt have occurred to many readers that throughout the foregoing discussion we have assumed that the persons who receive interest on machinery are in all cases the persons by whom the machinery was invented and produced.  To the actual inventors and producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such concession, it will be said, can be made to these men’s heirs.  An Edison or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a man has a son to whom this income descends—­a half-witted degenerate who squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who cannot work with his head—­no one can pretend that, in any sense of the word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he consumes.  And though all of those who live on the interest of inherited capital are not foolish nor vicious, yet in this respect they are all of them in the same position—­they have not produced their incomes, and so have no moral right to them.

In the second place, the following argument, which was discussed in an earlier chapter, will also be brought forward, refurbished for the present occasion.  Let us grant, it will be said, that the inventions which have enriched the world were originally due to the talents of exceptional men, and that without these exceptional men the world would never have possessed them; but when once they have been made, and their powers seen in operation, the human race at large can, if left to itself, take over these powers from the inventors just as the inventors took them over from nature.  Indeed, this constantly happens.  Any boy with a turning-lathe can to-day make a model steam-engine, and no one will contend that such a model was not made by himself, on the ground that it could not have been made either by him or by anybody unless Watt, with his exceptional genius, had invented steam as a motive-power.  One might as well contend that a savage does not really light his own fire, on the ground that the art of kindling wood was found out by Prometheus, and that no one, except for him, would have had any fires at all.  The truth is, it will be said, that in such cases as these the powers of the exceptional man, originally confined to himself, are, when his invention is once in practical operation, naturally shared by his fellows, who can only be restrained from using them by artificial devices such as patents—­these devices being at best, from a moral point of view, devices by which one man who has given a cheque to another man steals back half the money as soon as the cheque is cashed.