first, and then for
ourselves, if there is anything left. But here is something more
striking still. If the former of these two men, the worker, consumes
within the year any profit which may have been left him in that year, he
is always at the point from which he started, and his destiny condemns
him to move incessantly in a perpetual circle, and a monotony of
exertion. Labour, then, is rewarded only once. But if the other, the
'gentleman,' consumes his yearly income in the year, he has, the year
after, in those which follow, and through all eternity, an income always
equal, inexhaustible, _perpetual_. Capital, then, is remunerated, not
only once or twice, but an indefinite number of times! So that, at the
end of a hundred years, a family which has placed 20,000 francs,[1] at
five per cent., will have had 100,000 francs; and this will not prevent
it from having 100,000 more, in the following century. In other words,
for 20,000 francs, which represent its labour, it will have levied, in
two centuries, a tenfold value on the labour of others. In this social
arrangement, is there not a monstrous evil to be reformed? And this is
not all. If it should please this family to curtail its enjoyments a
little--to spend, for example, only 900 francs, instead of 1,000--it
may, without any labour, without any other trouble beyond that of
investing 100 francs a year, increase its capital and its income in such
rapid progression, that it will soon be in a position to consume as much
as a hundred families of industrious workmen. Does not all this go to
prove that society itself has in its bosom a hideous cancer, which ought
to be eradicated at the risk of some temporary suffering?"

These are, it appears to me, the sad and irritating reflections which
must be excited in your minds by the active and superficial crusade
which is being carried on against capital and interest. On the other
hand, there are moments in which, I am convinced, doubts are awakened in
your minds, and scruples in your conscience. You say to yourselves
sometimes, "But to assert that capital ought not to produce interest, is
to say that he who has created instruments of labour, or materials, or
provisions of any kind, ought to yield them up without compensation. Is
that just? And then, if it is so, who would lend these instruments,
these materials, these provisions? who would take care of them? who even
would create them? Every one would consume his proportion, and