om them.

The practical aspects of the question we will discuss in the following
chapter.

CHAPTER XIV

THE SOCIALISTIC ATTACK ON INTEREST AND THE NATURE OF ITS SEVERAL ERRORS

If we reconsider what we have seen in the last chapter, we shall realise
that the moral or theoretical attack on interest, as income which is
unjustifiable because it has not been personally earned, is, when tested
by the logic of those who make it, an attack, not on interest itself,
but on bequest; and that such is the case will become even more evident
when we see what the theory comes to, as translated into a practical
programme.

The majority of those who attack interest to-day, no matter whether in
other respects they are advocates of socialism or opponents of it, agree
in declaring that what a man has personally produced he has a perfect
right to enjoy and spend as he pleases. The only right they deny to him
is the right to any further products which, before the capital has been
spent by him, may result from the productive use of it. Now, the
practical object with which this restriction is advocated is to render
impossible, not accumulations of wealth (for these are recognised as
legitimate when the reward of personal talent), but merely their
perpetuation in the hands of others who are economically idle. So far,
therefore, as this practical object is concerned, it would matter little
whether the man by whom the accumulation was made were allowed to
receive interest on it during his own lifetime or no, provided that this
right to interest were not transmissible to his heir; or even whether he
were allowed or were not allowed to leave anything to an heir at all.
For the heir at best would merely receive a sum which, since it could
not be used by him so as to bring about its own renewal, would be bound
soon to exhaust itself; and the general effect of permitting bequests of
this sterilised kind would differ from the effect of prohibiting
bequests altogether, not because it would tend to render accumulated
fortunes permanent, but only because it would protract for a decade or
two the process of their inevitable dissipation.

We may, therefore, say that, for the purposes of the present discussion,
the modern attack on interest, considered apart from any otherwise
socialistic programme, practically translates itself into this--namely,
the advocacy of a scheme which, as regards the actual producers of
capital, leaves their existing r