the
machinery was invented and produced. To the actual inventors and
producers it may, indeed, be conceded that the interest which they
themselves receive has been earned by their own exertions; but no such
concession, it will be said, can be made to these men's heirs. An Edison
or a Bessemer may have produced whatever income has come to him in his
latest years from the inventive efforts of his earliest; but if such a
man has a son to whom this income descends--a half-witted degenerate who
squanders it on wine and women, who will not work with his hands and who
cannot work with his head--no one can pretend that, in any sense of the
word, a fool like this produces any fraction of the thousands that he
consumes. And though all of those who live on the interest of inherited
capital are not foolish nor vicious, yet in this respect they are all of
them in the same position--they have not produced their incomes, and so
have no moral right to them.

In the second place, the following argument, which was discussed in an
earlier chapter, will also be brought forward, refurbished for the
present occasion. Let us grant, it will be said, that the inventions
which have enriched the world were originally due to the talents of
exceptional men, and that without these exceptional men the world would
never have possessed them; but when once they have been made, and their
powers seen in operation, the human race at large can, if left to
itself, take over these powers from the inventors just as the inventors
took them over from nature. Indeed, this constantly happens. Any boy
with a turning-lathe can to-day make a model steam-engine, and no one
will contend that such a model was not made by himself, on the ground
that it could not have been made either by him or by anybody unless
Watt, with his exceptional genius, had invented steam as a motive-power.
One might as well contend that a savage does not really light his own
fire, on the ground that the art of kindling wood was found out by
Prometheus, and that no one, except for him, would have had any fires at
all. The truth is, it will be said, that in such cases as these the
powers of the exceptional man, originally confined to himself, are, when
his invention is once in practical operation, naturally shared by his
fellows, who can only be restrained from using them by artificial
devices such as patents--these devices being at best, from a moral point
of view, devices by which one man who