's unmended roof. If the managing body of a railroad
pays a higher dividend to the shareholders than can be got out of its
net earnings, the results are presently seen in cars that are growing
dirty, in engines that break down, in rotten sleepers, and in trains
that run off the track. The men who were once fed out of a certain
portion of the traffic receipts to keep these things in repair, are now
fed to dance for the shareholders, thus supplying them with spurious
dividends. A farm or a railroad which was managed on these principles
would ultimately cease to produce or to do anything for anybody; and if
all modern capital were managed in a similar way, all the multiplied
luxuries distinctive of modern civilisation would, one by one, disappear
like crops which were left to rot for lack of machines to reap them
with, and train services which had ceased because the engines were all
burned out.

That such a climax should ever, in any modern country, complete itself
cannot, let me say once more, be apprehended as a practical possibility;
but it is practically impossible only because the earlier stages of the
approach to it would lead to a situation that was intolerable long
before it ceased to be irreparable. And here we reach the point to
which the foregoing examination has been leading us. It is precisely
this course of conduct, the end of which would be general ruin, that any
attack on interest, by means of special taxation or otherwise, would, so
long as it lasted, stimulate and render inevitable. Let me point
out--though it ought in a general way to be self-evident--precisely how
this is.

We start with assuming--for, as we have seen already, so much is
conceded by those who attack interest to-day--that the owners of
capital, however their rights may be restricted, still have rights to it
of some kind. But a man's rights to his capital will not be rights at
all unless they empower him to use it in one way or another as a means
of ministering to his own personal desires; and it is possible for him
so to use it in one or other of two ways only--either by keeping it in
the form of some productive machine or plant, and living on a part of
the values which this produces, or by trenching on the substance of the
machine or the plant itself in the manner, and with the results, which
have just been explained and analysed. If, therefore, capitalists are to
be virtually deprived of their interest, either by means of a special
t