international and other, is
organized robbery, and instead of writing and reading books about it, we
ought to be putting financiers into prison and making a bonfire of their
bonds and shares and stock certificates. But, with all deference to
those who hold this view, it is based on a complete misapprehension of
the nature and origin of capital.

Capital has been described above as money put to certain purposes. This
was done for the sake of clearness and because this definition fits in
with the facts as they usually happen in these days. Economists define
capital as wealth reserved for production, and we must always remember
that money is only a claim for, or a right to, a certain amount of goods
or a certain amount of other people's work. Money is only a title to
wealth, because if I have a sovereign or a one-pound note in my pocket,
I thereby have the power of buying a pound's worth of goods or of
hiring a doctor to cure me or a parson to bury me or anybody else to do
anything that I want, up to the buying power of that sovereign. This is
the power that money carries with it. When the owner of this power,
instead of exercising it in providing himself with luxuries or
amusements, uses it by lending it to someone who wants to build a
factory, and employ workers, then, because the owner of the money
receives his rate of interest he is said to be exploiting labour,
because, so it is alleged, the workers work and he, the capitalist, sits
in idleness and lives on their labour.

And so, in fact, he does. But we have not yet found out how he got the
money that he lent. That money can only have been got by work done or
services rendered, for which other people were ready to pay. Capital,
looked at from this point of view, is simply stored up work, and
entitled to its reward just as much as the work done yesterday. The
capitalist lives on the work of others, but he can only do so because he
has wrought himself in days gone by or because someone else has wrought
and handed on to him the fruits of his labour. Let us take the case of
a shopkeeper who has saved a hundred pounds. This is his pay for work
done and risk taken (that the goods which he buys may not appeal to his
customers) during the years in which he has saved it. He might spend his
hundred pounds on a motor cycle and a side-car, or on furniture, or a
piano, and nobody would deny his right to do so. On the contrary he
would probably be applauded for giving employment