henever human talent invents and produces
a machine which adds to the productivity of any one who uses it with
sufficient intelligence, the inventor has shut up in his machine some
part of the forces of nature, as though it were an efreet whom a
magician has shut up in a bottle, and whose services he can keep for
himself, or hand over to others. The efreets shut up in machinery will
not work for human beings at all, unless there are human magicians who
manage thus to imprison them. They therefore belong to the men who, in
virtue of their special capacities, are alone capable of the effort
requisite to perform this feat; and it matters nothing to others, by
whom the efreets' services are borrowed, whether the effort in question
occupied a year or a day, or whether it took place yesterday or fifty
years ago.

The borrowed efreet produces the same surplus in either case, and
interest is a part of this surplus which goes, not to the efreet himself
(for this is not possible), but to his master, just as a cab-fare is
paid to the cabman and not his horse.

Machine-capital, then--or capital in its typical modern form--consists
of productive forces which are usable by, and which indeed exist for,
the human race at large, because, and only because, they have been
captured and imprisoned in implements by the efforts of exceptional men,
whose energy thus exercised is perpetuated, and can be lent to others;
and what these men receive as interest from those by whom their energy
is borrowed, is a something ultimately due to the energy of the lenders
themselves--nor is this fact in any way altered by lapse of time. Thus,
so far as these special men are concerned, the alleged difference
between earned income and unearned altogether disappears; and if one man
lives in luxury for sixty years on the interest of an invention which it
took him but a month to perfect, while another man every day has to toil
for his daily bread, the difference between the two consists not in the
fact that the one man works for his bread and the other man does nothing
for it, but in the fact that the work of one produces more in a day than
that of the other would do in a hundred lifetimes.

Here, however, we shall be met with two important objections. In the
first place, it will no doubt have occurred to many readers that
throughout the foregoing discussion we have assumed that the persons who
receive interest on machinery are in all cases the persons by whom