any nations nowadays,
of the rich and the poor, the educated and the ignorant. I myself was
rich and also educated, and possessed, therefore, all the elements of
happiness enjoyed by the most fortunate in that age. Living in luxury,
and occupied only with the pursuit of the pleasures and refinements of
life, I derived the means of my support from the labor of others,
rendering no sort of service in return. My parents and grandparents
had lived in the same way, and I expected that my descendants, if I
had any, would enjoy a like easy existence.

But how could I live without service to the world? you ask. Why should
the world have supported in utter idleness one who was able to render
service? The answer is that my great-grandfather had accumulated a sum
of money on which his descendants had ever since lived. The sum, you
will naturally infer, must have been very large not to have been
exhausted in supporting three generations in idleness. This, however,
was not the fact. The sum had been originally by no means large. It
was, in fact, much larger now that three generations had been
supported upon it in idleness, than it was at first. This mystery of
use without consumption, of warmth without combustion, seems like
magic, but was merely an ingenious application of the art now happily
lost but carried to great perfection by your ancestors, of shifting
the burden of one's support on the shoulders of others. The man who
had accomplished this, and it was the end all sought, was said to live
on the income of his investments. To explain at this point how the
ancient methods of industry made this possible would delay us too
much. I shall only stop now to say that interest on investments was a
species of tax in perpetuity upon the product of those engaged in
industry which a person possessing or inheriting money was able to
levy. It must not be supposed that an arrangement which seems so
unnatural and preposterous according to modern notions was never
criticised by your ancestors. It had been the effort of law-givers and
prophets from the earliest ages to abolish interest, or at least to
limit it to the smallest possible rate. All these efforts had,
however, failed, as they necessarily must so long as the ancient
social organizations prevailed. At the time of which I write, the
latter part of the nineteenth century, governments had generally given
up trying to regulate the subject at all.

By way of attempting to give the reade