Intelligent energy
produces all the profits that are secured by trading.

Modern apologists for usury, knowing that money is unproductive
itself, call it a tool for production, and as it can be readily
transformed into any tool, they try to avoid the logical conclusion
that the taking of interest on money is unjust and oppressive to the
producer.

But no tool is productive. All tools are but the reaching out of man
for the better control and mastery of material things.

The tool is but dead matter; the productive efficiency is in the vital
energy of the intelligent laborer. The most complicated and ingenious
tool ever made is useless without the operator. It is as helpless as
the wire without the electric current; as helpless as the body without
its life, for the body is but man's tool, preserved, and kept
efficient, and made productive, by the living energy alone.

Tools are but the reaching out of the vital energy beyond the body.
Tools are but the means, invented and constructed, by which the man
can overcome his physical limitations and accomplish wonders, the
impossible to a creature wanting in his intelligence.

These glasses enable dim eyes to see clearly. There is no ability in
the glasses to see; they would be of no use on blind eyes. I see,
these spectacles cannot see. Enlarge and so place these lenses that I
can see bacteria, or the mountains of the moon, yet this microscope or
this telescope has no more life nor sight than this single lens. I,
with it, see the minute creation or examine the distant planet. It is
but the extension of my eye.

This pen and paper and this book are but the means by which I reach
and reason with my fellow-men. They are but my tools to convey my
thought. I am reasoning with you, not this paper and ink.

My hand is the natural tool with which I labor. I may work in the
garden and plant the seed and destroy the weeds with my hand alone,
and there is no dispute but that I do the work. I take a small weeder
in my hand and greatly increase my efficiency. I take a hoe and reach
out further and greatly add to my efficiency. I am the efficient
agent. There is no power in the weeder or the hoe. I take my plow, as
my tool, and I tear up the soil and prepare it for my harvest. I take
the complicated harvester and gather it into my barn. In every part of
that process the tool is but the reaching out of my energy beyond my
body. There is no place where that tool becomes vitalized and