That such is the case is illustrated on a small scale by the conduct of individuals who live on their capital now.  If a farmer, whose capital consists largely of an agricultural plant, desires to spend more than his proceeds of his farm are worth, he virtually takes the men who have been mending his barns and reapers, and sets them to build a buggy which will take him to the neighbouring races.  The varnish on the buggy is bought with the rust on the reaper’s blades; the smart, weather-proof apron with the barn’s unmended roof.  If the managing body of a railroad pays a higher dividend to the shareholders than can be got out of its net earnings, the results are presently seen in cars that are growing dirty, in engines that break down, in rotten sleepers, and in trains that run off the track.  The men who were once fed out of a certain portion of the traffic receipts to keep these things in repair, are now fed to dance for the shareholders, thus supplying them with spurious dividends.  A farm or a railroad which was managed on these principles would ultimately cease to produce or to do anything for anybody; and if all modern capital were managed in a similar way, all the multiplied luxuries distinctive of modern civilisation would, one by one, disappear like crops which were left to rot for lack of machines to reap them with, and train services which had ceased because the engines were all burned out.

That such a climax should ever, in any modern country, complete itself cannot, let me say once more, be apprehended as a practical possibility; but it is practically impossible only because the earlier stages of the approach to it would lead to a situation that was intolerable long before it ceased to be irreparable.  And here we reach the point to which the foregoing examination has been leading us.  It is precisely this course of conduct, the end of which would be general ruin, that any attack on interest, by means of special taxation or otherwise, would, so long as it lasted, stimulate and render inevitable.  Let me point out—­though it ought in a general way to be self-evident—­precisely how this is.

We start with assuming—­for, as we have seen already, so much is conceded by those who attack interest to-day—­that the owners of capital, however their rights may be restricted, still have rights to it of some kind.  But a man’s rights to his capital will not be rights at all unless they empower him to use it in one way or another as a means of ministering to his own personal desires; and it is possible for him so to use it in one or other of two ways only—­either by keeping it in the form of some productive machine or plant, and living on a part of the values which this produces, or by trenching on the substance of the machine or the plant itself in the manner, and with the results, which have just been explained and analysed.  If, therefore, capitalists are to be virtually deprived of their interest, either by means of a special tax