essential difference between the effects on national prosperity of
a Government paying interest on money which it spent in fire works
fifty years ago, and of a Government paying interest on money to be
employed to-day on productive labour.

That difference, which the reader will find stated and examined at
length, in Secs. 127-129 of this volume, it is the business of economists,
before approaching any other question relating to government, fully to
explain. And the paragraphs to which I refer, contain, I believe, the
only definite statement of it hitherto made.

The practical result of the absence of any such statement is, that
capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade
the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want guns to
shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the
manufacture of which the capitalists get a per-centage, and men of
science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain
number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other's homes
down in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers,
arsenals, &c., in ornamental patterns; (and the victorious party put
also some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both,
annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and
gunpowder. And that is what capitalists call "knowing what to do with
their money;" and what commercial men in general call "practical" as
opposed to "sentimental" Political Economy.

Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1860, perceiving then fully, (as
Carlyle had done long before), what distress was about to come on the
said populace of Europe through these errors of their teachers, I began
to do the best I might, to combat them, in the series of papers for the
_Cornhill Magazine_, since published under the title of _Unto this
Last_. The editor of the Magazine was my friend, and ventured the
insertion of the three first essays; but the outcry against them became
then too strong for any editor to endure, and he wrote to me, with great
discomfort to himself, and many apologies to me, that the Magazine must
only admit one Economical Essay more.

I made, with his permission, the last one longer than the rest, and gave
it blunt conclusion as well as I could--and so the book now stands; but,
as I had taken not a little pains with the Essays, and knew that they
contained better work than most of my former writi