ax on "unearned incomes" or otherwise, but are yet permitted to enjoy
their capital somehow, no course is open to them but to employ for their
private pleasures the men by whom this capital, in such forms as
machines or railroads, is at present maintained, renewed, and kept from
lapsing into a state in which it would be unable to do or to produce
anything. And if any one still thinks that, by such a course of conduct,
if ever it became general, as it would do under these conditions, the
owners of capital would be injuring themselves alone, he need only
reflect a little longer on one of our suggested illustrations, and ask
himself whether the gradual deterioration of railroads would have no
effect on the world beyond that of impoverishing the shareholders. It
would obviously affect the many as much as it affected the few, and the
kind of catastrophe that would result from the deterioration of
railroads is typical of that which would result from the deterioration
of capital generally.

It would, then, be a sufficient answer to those who attack interest, and
propose to transfer it from its present recipients to the state, to
elucidate, as has here been done, the two following points: firstly,
that to interest as a means of enjoying wealth--the right to such
enjoyment itself not being here disputed--the only alternative is a
system which would thus prove fatal to everybody; and, further, that,
conversely, the enjoyment of wealth through interest not only possesses
this negative advantage, but is actively implicated in, and is the
natural corollary of, that progressive accumulation of force in the form
of productive machinery to which all the augmented wealth of the modern
world is due. By the identification of the enjoyment of capital with
the enjoyment of some portion of the products of it, the good of the
individual capitalist is identified with the good of the community; for
it will, in that case, be the object of all capitalists to raise the
productivity of all capital to a maximum; while a system which would
compel the possessor, if he is to enjoy his capital at all, to do so by
diminishing its substance and allowing its powers to dwindle, would
identify the only advantage he could possibly get for himself with the
impoverishment of everybody else, and ultimately of himself also.

But the crucial facts of the case have not been exhausted yet. There are
few phenomena of any complex society which are not traceable to mor