question is
whether the proposed confiscation of interest is in reality, as its
advocates maintain it to be, practicable in the sense that the
disturbances which it would necessarily cause would not interfere with
the production of the fund which it is desired to distribute, and so
perhaps leave all classes poorer and not richer than they are. The other
question is whether such a confiscation would be just. To some people
this second question will possibly seem superfluous. If it can be shown,
they will say, that a policy, the avowed object of which is the
enrichment of the many at the expense of the relatively few, could be
really carried out successfully, and if the many had the power of
insisting on it, an inquiry into its abstract justice is merely a waste
of time; for whenever the wolf is face to face with the lamb, it will
eat up the lamb first and justify its conduct afterwards. And in this
argument there is a certain amount of truth; but those who take it for
the whole truth allow their own cynicism to overreach them. The fact
remains that even the wolves of the human world are obliged to assume,
as a kind of necessary armour, and often as their principal weapon, a
semblance of justice, however they may despise the reality. The brigand
chief justifies his war on society by declaring that society has
unjustly made war on him. The wildest demagogues, in their appeals to
popular passion, as the history of the French Revolution and of all
revolutions shows us, have always been obliged to exhibit the demands of
mere self-interest as based on some general theory of what is morally
just or right; and however much the theory may accommodate itself to the
hope of private advantage, there are few demands made for any great
social change which do not derive a large part of their force from
persons with whom a belief in the justice of the demands stands first,
while--so far at least as their own consciousness is concerned--the
prospect of personal advantage stands second or nowhere. This is
certainly so in the case which we are now considering. We will,
therefore, begin with the question of abstract justice.

Let us begin, then, with reminding ourselves that when interest is
attacked as such, on the ground that its recipients have themselves done
nothing to produce it, whereas other incomes, no matter how large, are
presumably the equivalents of some personal effort which corresponds to
them, it is assumed that every man h