practical moment. I mean the question of interest, or the income
which comes to its recipients without any necessary effort on their own
part to correspond to it.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] I met an interesting embodiment of this mood of mind in America, in
the person of a slim young man, well-dressed, well-educated, refined in
his speech and manners, who worked as a clerk or accountant in some
large financial house. To my great astonishment he introduced himself to
me as a socialist. "I don't believe like Marx," he said, "that labour
produces everything, but I maintain that the task-work of the employed
and directed labourer, of whatever grade--whether he uses a pen or a
chisel--is always worth more than the wages which the employers pay him
for performing it. I feel this myself with regard to my own firm. Month
by month I am worth to it more than the sums it gives me. This," he went
on, with an odd gleam in his eyes, "is what I may not endure to think
of--that others should be always appropriating values which I have
produced myself; and nine out of ten of the men who become socialists,
do so because they feel as I do about this particular point."

[19] General Walker also seeks to assimilate the product of ability to
rent; and my criticism of Mr. Webb in this respect applies to him also.
General Walker's book was mentioned frequently in connection with my
late addresses in America; and it was said by one or two critics that I
had borrowed from, and ought to have acknowledged my debt to, him. As a
matter of fact, I never saw his book till after my return to England,
when I read it with interest and admiration. His doctrines with regard
to the _entrepreneur_ is, so far as it goes, fundamentally identical
with the main argument of this volume. My criticism of him would be that
he does not give to this particular part of his doctrine the foremost
place which logically belongs to it; and that though attributing to the
_entrepreneur_ some special productive faculty distinct from labour, he
starts his work with re-enumerating the old doctrine that labour,
capital, and law are the only factors in production.

[20] For example, the silk factory at Derby, erected by Lombe, in the
reign of George II., the machinery of which comprised 26,000 wheels.

[21] These figures represent less than the truth. They are merely given
in order to indicate the general character of the situation to-day, as
compared with that of an earlier, but stil