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 rights both to principal and interest untouched, and would not even extinguish altogether their existing powers of bequest, but would limit the exercise of these to the principal sum only,[23] and prohibit the transmission to any private person of any right whatever to the usufruct of its productive employment.
Here, then, at last, we have something definite to discuss--a single proposed alteration in certain existing arrangements; and by comparing the situation which actually exists to-day with that which the proposed alteration, if carried into effect, would produce, we shall see whether the alteration is workable and practically defensible or no.

Let us begin with the situation which actually exists to-day, confining ourselves to those features of it which are vital to the present issue.
Let us take two men of practically contrasted types, each of whom has inherited a capital of fifty thousand pounds.