nd that the men who bring
empty hands to the mill should take all the product of it. To most
men's instinctive judgment this view does not appeal. The general
verdict is that it is right for capital to get something.

If we are fishing together from the shore and I make a canoe which
multiplies my catch by five, I have a right to the extra return which
my new instrument gives me. If my neighbor asks me to lend it to him
and I do so, I deprive myself of the extra product I have been getting
by means of it, and it is right for him to pay me interest on the cost
of the boat. He can do it and make money by the transaction. If his
catch is now five times what it was, he can afford to pay me a part of
the extra return and still be better off than he was before.

If my share is still large, other men will make boats and offer them
for hire. They will compete in lending them till a modest percentage of
the cost is all that any owner can get. The borrowers will then get the
major benefit. This implies competition and shows the necessity of
preserving it.

If, in lieu of lending my canoe, I persuade another man to take it and
fish for me, I shall have to give him more fish than he was originally
catching; and the more the boats multiply, the larger the share which
will have to be given to the men who are hired to work them, and the
smaller the share which will be kept by the owner of any one boat.
_Under a normal condition, multiplying capital means in itself higher
wages._ Higher wages mean that laborers, in the end, begin to get boats
of their own, or shares in boats, and that the laboring-class and the
capitalist class are more and more merged. Invention--that is, devising
and introducing canoes--and accumulation of capital--that is, active
canoe-building--mean for laborers higher pay and a chance to save
capital.

Do you tell me that this is a primitive State, an Eden of the past and
hopelessly vanished from the present earth; that it is a lost Paradise
whose gates are forever barred? The whole point of the economic study
of which I have given the briefest outline is that it is practicable to
create in complex modern life the most essential condition of this
primitive life--its tendency toward justice. In the Scriptures the
primitive Eden was a garden, but the New Jerusalem is a city. What we
have before us for study is a vast centralized economic system
suggesting the city; and we have to see what can be made of it.

I