on “unearned incomes” or otherwise, but are yet permitted to enjoy their capital somehow, no course is open to them but to employ for their private pleasures the men by whom this capital, in such forms as machines or railroads, is at present maintained, renewed, and kept from lapsing into a state in which it would be unable to do or to produce anything.  And if any one still thinks that, by such a course of conduct, if ever it became general, as it would do under these conditions, the owners of capital would be injuring themselves alone, he need only reflect a little longer on one of our suggested illustrations, and ask himself whether the gradual deterioration of railroads would have no effect on the world beyond that of impoverishing the shareholders.  It would obviously affect the many as much as it affected the few, and the kind of catastrophe that would result from the deterioration of railroads is typical of that which would result from the deterioration of capital generally.

It would, then, be a sufficient answer to those who attack interest, and propose to transfer it from its present recipients to the state, to elucidate, as has here been done, the two following points:  firstly, that to interest as a means of enjoying wealth—­the right to such enjoyment itself not being here disputed—­the only alternative is a system which would thus prove fatal to everybody; and, further, that, conversely, the enjoyment of wealth through interest not only possesses this negative advantage, but is actively implicated in, and is the natural corollary of, that progressive accumulation of force in the form of productive machinery to which all the augmented wealth of the modern world is due.  By the identification of the enjoyment of capital with the enjoyment of some portion of the products of it, the good of the individual capitalist is identified with the good of the community; for it will, in that case, be the object of all capitalists to raise the productivity of all capital to a maximum; while a system which would compel the possessor, if he is to enjoy his capital at all, to do so by diminishing its substance and allowing its powers to dwindle, would identify the only advantage he could possibly get for himself with the impoverishment of everybody else, and ultimately of himself also.

But the crucial facts of the case have not been exhausted yet.  There are few phenomena of any complex society which are not traceable to more causes than one, or at least to one cause which presents itself under different aspects.  Such is the case with interest.  Its origin, its functions, and its justification, in the modern world, must be considered under an aspect, at which hitherto we have only glanced.