who this writer is. He is Henry George, who is best known to the
public as the advocate of a measure of confiscation so crude and so
arbitrary, that even socialists have condemned it as impracticable
without serious modifications. Henry George, however, although he outdid
most socialists in his attack on private wealth of one particular
kind--that is to say, the rent of land--was equally vehement in his
defence of the interest of industrial capital. Socialists say--and the
aphorism is constantly repeated--"A man can get an income only by
working or stealing; there is no third way." In answer to this, it was
pointed out by George that one kind of wealth, at all events--and we may
add that here we have wealth in its oldest form--consists of possessions
yielding a natural increase, which has been neither made by the
possessors, nor yet stolen by them from anybody else. That is to say, it
consists of flocks and herds. A shepherd or herdsman starts with a
single pair of animals, from which parents there arises a large progeny.
This living increment has not been produced by the man, but it is still
more obvious that it has not been produced by his neighbours, and it
therefore belongs in justice to the man who owns the parents. George
pointed out also that whole classes of possessions besides are, for by
far the larger part of their value, equally independent either of
corresponding work or of theft. Among such possessions are wines, whose
quality improves with time, and which, if sold to-day, may be worth
tenpence a bottle, but which four years hence may be worth perhaps
half-a-crown. In all such cases--this was George's contention--we have
some possession originally small to start with, which year by year is
increased in amount or at least in value, not by the efforts of the
possessor, but by the secret operations of nature. Here, he argued, we
have capital in its typical form; and interest is the gift of nature to
the man by whom the capital is owned.

George, however, is constrained to supplement this proposition by
another. Though he assumes that of the products which are, in the modern
world, actually paid as interest by the borrower of capital to the
owners of it, the larger part consists of gifts of unaided nature, he
admits that they are not the whole. He admits that a part of it is paid
for the use of machinery. Now, such interest, he says, has a definitely
different origin, and cannot intrinsically be justified in t