634 PROCEEDINGS OP SECTION P. 



to earn a living, and fetches interest, will be found on 

 examination to consist, not of foods, tools, instruments of 

 production, but of claims. Claims founded on past services, 

 real or supposed ; often real and just, but often purely 

 illusory, often representing an injury done, not a benefit 

 conferred (as in the "savings" afore-mentioned), often founded 

 on trusts, rings, monopolies of one kind or another, on 

 some one having got possession of something vrhich was 

 necessary to other people, land, purchasing power or what 

 not, and charging other people for the mere permission to use 

 it, and moreover originating for the most part in the acts of 

 somebody untraceable, long since dead and forgotten, but 

 whose tribute-levying power has been handed down from 

 successor to successor, gathering like an avalanche as it 

 descended. 



This capital wiiicli rules the world does not consist of food 

 and tools. If it did, the grower of food and the manufac- 

 turer of tools would be lords of the industrial world, and we 

 know that they are not. We know that both the grower of 

 food and the manufacturer of tools are too often at the mercy 

 of the man who has neither the one nor the other, who has 

 nothing at all, indeed, but a big bank balance representing 

 savings and consisting of accumulated claims ; who often 

 has not furthered any single enterprise, has not done a hand- 

 stroke towards it, has not designed or directed it, has not 

 grown the food or manufactui"ed the tools with which it was 

 carried on ; has not furnished a single requisite for it, but only 

 invested in it. All the requisites for that (or any other) enter- 

 prise were present independently of him ; the people willing to 

 work, the land to work on, the food, the tools to work with, the 

 brains to devise and dii-ect ; but precisely tecause the proceeds of 

 all previous work had gone (barring mere maintenance and a 

 trifle over) not to the men who did the work but to " capitalists," 

 whose all-devouring claims absorbed all the profit, therefore the 

 real workers have no " capital " of their own to undertake 

 anything. The labourers cannot buy the food and tools, the 

 food-growers and tool-makers cannot hii*e the labourers, for 

 want of the money. So both, though they have all the 

 requisites tetween them, have to wait till a big capitalist appears, 

 approves, and invests. The very fact that he has abeady got 

 much more than his proper share of the proceeds of previous 

 work enables him to appropriate the lion's share of this work 

 also, in which he takes no real part whatever. He uses his 

 accumulated claims to establish further claims still. This at 



