from that servitude to previously
accumulated capital in which the whole creation groaneth and travaileth.
By the simple expedient of paying for the work in Government
notes--issued to the purveyors of material, the master-workmen and the
operatives, accepted as currency throughout the island, and eventually
redeemed out of the annual market revenues--all tribute to the
capitalist was avoided. In face of this successful experiment, the fact
that we, in England, continued to raise loans and subject ourselves to
"drag at each remove a lengthening chain" of interest on public debt,
often seemed so perplexingly foolish as to be inexplicable, except as
the outcome of some deep-laid plot of "the money power."

When first I heard of this Guernsey Market House, as in some mysterious
way exempted from the common lot, I was curious to enquire what
transaction had, in fact, taken place in an island which was, after all,
not so far removed in space or time from the Lombard Street that I knew.
In all the writings of the economists (for which my estimate was at that
time, as indeed it is now, such as I could not easily put into
appropriate words), I found no mention of this Phoenix among
market-houses. I fear that, too hastily, I dismissed the story as
mythical.

Now Mr. J. Theodore Harris--having, I suspect, a warmer feeling for the
incident than he has allowed to appear in these scientific pages--has
done what perhaps I or some other economic student of the eighties or
nineties ought to have done, namely, gone to Guernsey to dig up, out of
the official records, the incident as it actually occurred. What is
interesting is that he has found that the myth of the veteran Owenite or
Chartist is, in all essentials, confirmed by the documents. The story is
true. The Guernsey Market House was built without a loan and without the
payment of interest.

It does not follow, however, that it was any more built without the aid
of capital, than was St. Paul's Cathedral or the Manchester Ship Canal.
Mr. Harris, contenting himself with the austerely exact record drawn
from the documents, does not indulge in any speculative hypothesis as to
who provided the capital, or who bore the burden that would otherwise
have been interest. Let me use the fuller privilege of the
preface-writer, and supply some hypothetical elucidations.

What the Guernsey community did was that which nearly every community
has done at one time or another, namely, issue pap