And it is not historically true to maintain, as Marx does, that the profits of the capitalist are obtained simply by appropriating the products of unpaid labour. In initiating and managing, the capitalist is charged with the most difficult and important part of the work of production. As a natural consequence, it follows that Marx is also historically inaccurate in roundly explaining capital as the accumulation of unpaid labour appropriated by the capitalist. In past accumulation, as in the control and management of industry generally, the capitalist has had the leading part. Capital, therefore, is not necessarily robbery, and in an economic order in which the system of free exchange is the rule and the mutually beneficial interchange of utilities, no objection can be raised to the principle of lending and borrowing of money for interest. In short, in his theory of unpaid labour as supplying the key to his explanation of the genesis and development of the capitalistic system, Marx is not true to history. It is the perfectly logical outcome of certain of the leading principles of the Ricardian school, but it does not give an adequate or accurate account of the facts of economic evolution. In his theory of unpaid labour Marx is not consistent with the general principles of his own philosophy of social evolution. With him history is a process determined by material forces, a succession of orderly phenomena controlled by natural laws. Now we may waive the objection suggested by the principle enunciated in the Marx school itself, that it is not legitimate to apply ethical categories in judgment on economic processes that are merely natural; which, however, Marx does with revolutionary emphasis throughout some hundreds of pages of his great work. It is more important to point out, in perfect consistency with the principles of the school, that the energy and inventiveness of the early capitalists especially were the most essential factors in determining the existence and development of a great economic era, and that the assertion of freedom was an indispensable condition in breaking the bonds of the old feudal order, which the new system displaced. Instead, therefore, of living and growing rich on the produce of unpaid labour, the capitalist had a great social and industrial function to perform, and played a great part in historic evolution. The position and function of the workman was subordinate.