titude should not restrain
us from doubting whether they were really well advised to do so. If we
ask the question _how_ they managed to do so, our doubts are
deepened. For first place among the explanations must be assigned to
the inequality in the then distribution of wealth. It was because many
men in England were rich enough to save that our railways were built,
and the resources of new Continents were opened up. But England, a
century or even half a century ago, was not really a rich
community. And if the national income in those days had been
distributed more evenly among the people, can we doubt that they would
have spent a far larger proportion of it on immediate needs; can we
doubt that they would have been right to do so? We may rather doubt,
in view of the reactions of poverty on physical and mental efficiency,
on social harmony, even possibly on population, whether we to-day
would have been really injured as much as might appear. How, then, can
we suppose that the sum of the amounts which it suits individuals to
save will bear any close relation to the resources which the community
can properly devote to future ends? Are we to regard an unjust
distribution of wealth as a mysterious dispensation of Providence for
securing perfect harmony between the future and the present? The
point need not be labored further. There are no grounds for assuming
that we save, as a community, even roughly what we ought to save. If
we wish to believe we do, we must turn for support from economics to
theology.

It is important to be clear upon this issue in order to distinguish it
from another, with which it sometimes seems to be confused. This is
the question, briefly outlined in Chapter II, of the effect of changes
in the rate of interest on the supply of capital. As was there
indicated, there are good reasons for supposing that a fall in the
rate of interest would induce some people to save more, and
conversely. But the balance of probability is in favor of the
conclusion that the _net_ effect of changes in the rate of interest,
though perhaps slight, is usually of the more ordinary kind. The
decisive argument in this connection is the fact, upon which we have
just touched, that savings are supplied largely by people who are
relatively rich, and who become richer when the rate of interest
rises. For at this point it is necessary to be careful. It is easy to
slide from the above conclusion into an argument of the following
ki