ld not have produced alone.

Here, then, we see that in one respect at all events the two kinds of
capital, which George attempts to contrast, yield interest for a
precisely similar reason. Both consist of a productive power or agency
which is external to the borrower himself; and it makes no difference to
him whether the auxiliary power borrowed inheres in living tissue, or in
a mechanism of brass or iron.

But the resemblance between these two forms of capital, and the identity
of the reasons why both of them bear interest, do not end here. I quoted
in a former chapter an observation of Mr. Sidney Webb's, which he
himself applies in a very foolish way, but which is obviously true in
itself, and in the present connection is pertinent. Some men he admits
are incomparably more productive than others, because they happen to be
born with a special kind of ability. But what is this ability itself? It
is simply the result, he says, of a process which lies behind
them--namely, the natural process of animal and human evolution; and its
special products are like those of exceptionally fertile land. That is
to say, the ability which produces modern machines is in reality just as
much a force of nature as that which makes live-stock fertile, and
brings raw wine to maturity. But the same line of argument will carry us
much farther than this. As Dr. Beattie Crozier has shown in his work,
_The Wheel of Wealth_, the part which nature plays in productive
machinery is not confined to the brains of the gifted inventors and
their colleagues. It is incorporated in, and identified with, the actual
machines themselves. The lever, the cam, the eccentric, the crank, the
piston, the turbine, the boiler with the vapour imprisoned in
it--devices which it has taxed the brains of the greatest men to
elaborate and to co-ordinate--were all latent in nature before these men
made them actual; and when once such devices are actualised it is
nature that makes them go. There is not merely a transformation of so
much human energy into the same amount of natural energy; but nature
adds to the former a non-human energy of her own; as--to take a good
illustration of Dr. Crozier's--obviously happens in the case of a charge
of gunpowder, which, "when used for purposes of blasting, has," he
observes, "in itself a thousand times the quantity of pure economic
power that is bought in the work of the labourers who supply and mix the
ingredients." That is to say, w