for otherwise I should not
mention, and should know nothing of his private affairs--brings to its
author wealth in the form of amazing royalties; but until it is acted it
brings him no royalties at all, and the actors begin with it only when
his own efforts are ended. Moreover, not only do these royalties only
begin then, but having once begun, they have no tendency to exhaust
themselves. On the contrary the chances are that they will go on
increasing till the time arrives, if it ever does, when Mr. Shaw is no
longer appreciated. Mr. Shaw, in fact, if he had written one of his most
successful plays at twenty, might, so far as that play is concerned, be
idle for ever afterwards, even if he lived to the age of Methuselah, and
still be enjoying in royalties the product of his own exertions, though
he had not exerted himself productively for some seven or eight hundred
years.

There is no question here of whether, under these conditions, a person
like Mr. Shaw might not feel himself constrained on some ground or other
to surrender his copyright at some period prior to his own demise. The
one point here insisted on is that he could not renounce it on the
ground that the wealth protected by it was no longer produced by
himself. If he is entitled to the royalties resulting from the
performance of his play at any time, on the ground that every man has a
right to the products of his own exertions, his right to the royalties
resulting from its ten-thousandth performance is, on this ground, as
good as his right to the royalties resulting from the first. The
royalties on a play, in short, show how certain forms of effort, though
not all, continue to yield a product for an indefinite period, though
the original effort itself may be never again repeated; and herein these
royalties are typical of modern interest generally. They do not,
however, constitute in themselves more than a small part of it. We will
therefore turn to interest of other kinds, the details of whose genesis
are indeed widely different, but which consist similarly of a constant
repetition of values, without any corresponding repetition of the effort
in which the series originated.

Those which we will consider first are the products of organic nature,
which have been dwelt upon by a well-known writer as showing us the
ultimate source of industrial interest generally, and also at the same
time its natural and essential justice. It may be a surprise to some to
learn