t the plant is never sold.

Usually, the usurer is a fourth party that stands yet behind the third
party, taking no risks, demanding complete security for his loan and
also an increase out of the products of the operators. The third party
assumes all care and guarantees against all losses and depends for his
compensation on a portion of the product after the demands of the
fourth party are satisfied. This third party may be an active
producer. All that he receives may be fully earned in care, oversight
and management of the business of the plant.

But the fourth party can have no claim for his services, he has no
part in the production. The absurdity, the figment that his capital is
productive, is introduced to cover the evident fraud of appropriating,
without compensation, a portion of the products of the operators. He
has no more claim to an increase of his capital year by year and a
doubling in a term of years, than the laborers who built it have to
the same plant, perfect and unworn at the end of a term, and in
addition, another plant equal in every respect. They built but one,
they have no claim upon a second. For the usurer, who takes their
place, to double his wealth, and yet the debt be undischarged, is a
flagrant fraud.

The underlying falsehood is that wealth changes its nature when put in
the hands of a live man and becomes productive. It is acknowledged
that wealth lying in the vault is barren and at the same time it is
claimed that it produces in the hands of an intelligent agent. But it
is the same dead, helpless, barren thing wherever it may be found and
whatever form it may be made to take. The dollar taken from the vault
and exchanged for a hoe does not receive this new quality. The hoe is
as dead as the dollar. When this hoe is in the hands of the workman it
is the same barren thing is was before he picked it up. These glasses
are precisely the same when astride my nose as when lying on the
table. It is not true that wealth in any form, though it be that of a
useful tool, takes on this new quality or attribute when in the hands
of a live man.

A man's labor is more productive with suitable tools than without
them. The same energy will secure far greater returns. If it were not
so he would not trouble to make tools or use them. But to call tools
productive agents and so reward them is to rob intelligent energy,
skill and inventive genius of that which they alone can produce. This
degrades the man t