518 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



Public Debts Impolitic and Immoral. 



There is another consideration that is usually overlooked 

 in this connection, and thus helps to obscure the real 

 issue. Under our highly artificial and complex monetary 

 system, the " property " left by rich men is seldom real 

 wealth, but consists almost wholly of claims upon, or tribute 

 exacted from society at large. Real wealth is highly 

 perishable food, clothing, houses, tools, machinery, &c. 

 and if such wealth were given to another in large quanti- 

 ties it would rapidly deteriorate or require a considerable 

 annual expenditure to preserve its value. But by our money- 

 market system of funds, stocks, shares, and rents, permanent 

 incomes are derived from perishable wealth, to the injury 

 of all who are forced to pay these incomes. Money has been 

 diverted from its original and beneficial purpose of facili- 

 tating the mutual exchange of commodities " a tool of 

 exchange/' as some economists have termed it into a 

 means of enabling large numbers of wealthy individuals 

 to live permanently at the expense of their working fellow- 

 citizens. This is the real reason of the objection of the 

 ancient law-givers to usury, that it enables men to live 

 without doing any useful work ; and the objection of 

 modern socialists to interest is, not that to take interest 

 for the use of money is morally wrong, but that the 

 general application of the principle of national or muni- 

 cipal interest-bearing debts, railway shares, &c., afford the 

 conditions by which perishable wealth is changed into 

 permanent property, and offers facilities for the most 

 gigantic and harmful system of gambling the world has 

 ever seen. 



All wealth so acquired is a means of impoverishing those 

 whose work produces all the real wealth that is consumed 

 annually. Adam Smith again and again states this fact, 

 that the annual consumption of the whole population, 

 including all the idle rich, is produced annually by the 

 workers ; and it is because the system of interest enables 

 false wealth, which is really tribute exacted from the 

 people, to go on increasing indefinitely, and thus tends 



