enrichment of the many at the expense of the relatively few, could be really carried out successfully, and if the many had the power of insisting on it, an inquiry into its abstract justice is merely a waste of time; for whenever the wolf is face to face with the lamb, it will eat up the lamb first and justify its conduct afterwards.  And in this argument there is a certain amount of truth; but those who take it for the whole truth allow their own cynicism to overreach them.  The fact remains that even the wolves of the human world are obliged to assume, as a kind of necessary armour, and often as their principal weapon, a semblance of justice, however they may despise the reality.  The brigand chief justifies his war on society by declaring that society has unjustly made war on him.  The wildest demagogues, in their appeals to popular passion, as the history of the French Revolution and of all revolutions shows us, have always been obliged to exhibit the demands of mere self-interest as based on some general theory of what is morally just or right; and however much the theory may accommodate itself to the hope of private advantage, there are few demands made for any great social change which do not derive a large part of their force from persons with whom a belief in the justice of the demands stands first, while—­so far at least as their own consciousness is concerned—­the prospect of personal advantage stands second or nowhere.  This is certainly so in the case which we are now considering.  We will, therefore, begin with the question of abstract justice.

Let us begin, then, with reminding ourselves that when interest is attacked as such, on the ground that its recipients have themselves done nothing to produce it, whereas other incomes, no matter how large, are presumably the equivalents of some personal effort which corresponds to them, it is assumed that every man has, in natural justice, a right to such wealth as he actually himself produces; and what he produces, as we saw in the last chapter, is that amount of wealth which would not have been produced at all had his efforts not been made, or been other or less intense than they have been.

Thus far, then, for the purposes of the present discussion, all parties are agreed; but the moment the assailants of interest take the next step in their argument, we shall find that their errors begin—­errors resulting, as we shall see, from an imperfect analysis of facts.  For them the two types of correspondence between productive effort and product are, firstly, the manual labourer, who performs some daily task such as riveting plates or bricklaying, and receives an equivalent in wages at the end of each day or week; and, secondly, the manager of some great industrial enterprise, who spends each day so many hours in his office, issuing minute directions with regard to the conduct of his subordinates, and sending his receipts to the bank as they come in from his customers.  But these types, though accurate so far as they go, do but cover a part of the actual field of fact.  Practically, though of course not absolutely, they ignore the element of time.  They represent effort and product as being always so nearly simultaneous that, although the former must literally precede the latter, yet, if we estimate life in terms of years, or even months, or weeks, a man has ceased to produce as soon as he has ceased to work.