ne himself and keep
what he can make in competition with others' means of production. If
no one chooses to use his machine, then, no matter how good a thing it
may be, he gets nothing from his invention. So that even the inventor
is no exception to my statement that no man ever gets rich by his own
labor.

The inventor is not the real inventor of the machine: he only carries
on the work which others began thousands of years ago. He takes the
results of other people's inventive genius and adds his quota. But he
claims the whole. And when he has done his work and added his
contribution to the age-long development of mechanical modes of
production, he must depend again upon society, upon the labor of
others.

To return to the question of abstinence: I would not attempt to deny
that some men have saved part of their income and by investing it
secured the beginnings of great fortunes. I know that is so. But the
fortunes came out of the labor of other people. Somebody had to
produce the wealth, that is quite evident. And if the person who got
it was not that somebody, the producer, it is as clear as noonday that
the producer must have produced something he did not get.

No, my friend, the notion that profits are the reward of abstinence
and thrift is stupid in the extreme. The people who enjoy the
profit-incomes of the world, are, with few exceptions, people who have
not been either abstemious or thrifty.

But perhaps you will say that, while this may be true of the people
who to-day are getting enormous incomes from rent, interest or profit,
we must go further back; that we must go back to the beginning of
things when their fathers or their grandfathers began by investing
their savings.

To that I have no objection whatever, provided only that you are
willing to go back, not merely to the beginning of the individual
fortune, but to the beginning of the system. If your grandfather, or
great-grandfather, had been what is termed a thrifty and industrious
man, working hard, living poor, working his wife and little ones in
one long grind, all in order to save money to invest in business, you
might now be a rich man; that is, supposing you were heir to their
possessions.

That is not at all certain, for it is a fact that most of the men who
have hoarded their individual savings and then invested them have been
ruined and fooled. In the case of our railroads, for example, the
great majority of the early investors of saving