It was pointed out, however, that the reward, in order to be operative, must be such as will be felt to be sufficient by these men themselves, and that its precise amount and quality can be determined by them alone--just as, if what we desire is to coax an invalid to eat, we can coax him only with food which he himself finds appetising.

Let us now take these questions up again, and examine them more minutely, and we shall find that interest is justified from a practical point of view by the fact that the enjoyment of capital by this particular means is not only the sole manner of enjoying it which is consistent with the general welfare, but also constitutes the advantage which, in the eyes of most great producers, gives to capital the larger part of its value, and renders the desire of producing it efficient as a social motive.
The reasons why the right to interest forms, in the eyes of the active producers of capital, the main object of their activity are to be found, firstly, in the facts of family affection, and, secondarily, in those of general social intercourse, which together form the medium of by far the larger part of our satisfactions.

In spite of the selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man's desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who are notoriously selfish otherwise, shows how deeply it is ingrained in the human character.

One of the first uses to which a man who has produced great wealth puts it is in most cases to build a house more or less proportionate to his means; and it is his pride and pleasure to see his wife and children acclimatise themselves to their new environment.
But such a house would lose most of its charm and meaning for him if the fortune which enabled him to live in it were to dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars.

If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if--to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom--"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of what now makes it desirable.
But since individuals and generations are not thus separated actually, but are, on the contrary, not merely as a scientific fact, but as a fact which is vivid to every one within the limits of his daily consciousness dovetailed into one another, and could not exist otherwise, a man's own fortune, with the kind of life that is dependent on it, is similarly dovetailed into fortunes of other people, and his present and theirs is dovetailed into a general future.
We have seen how this is the case with regard to his own family; but the matter does not end there.