Capital, then, as such, is as true a producer of wealth as the men were who in the first instance produced it; and when one of them passes a portion of it on to his son, and with it the income that results from it, this income is nothing that is stolen from other men, but is simply a part of the product produced by the artificial slaves, the use of whom other men for their own advantage borrow, and who rightly belong to the lender because he has received them from his fathers, who created them. And should any socialist quarrel with this reasoning, it will be sufficient to point out to him that it is neither more nor less than the reasoning which, till only a few years ago, the leaders of socialism themselves were never weary of employing. Capital, said Lassalle, is merely labour fossilised: and so long as labour was held to be the only wealth-producer, the socialists urged that capital belonged to the labourers, because it represented the labour of their fathers, whose heirs they were. But with the gradual disappearance of the doctrine that labour is the sole producer, it is becoming more and more evident that capital is not what Lassalle thought it was—that it is not fossilised labour, but fossilised business ability. In other words, it does not, except in its earliest stages, represent on the part of producers a process of exceptional saving. What it does represent is a process of exceptional production. Since then the labourers, as labourers, {316} would have been the rightful heirs to all capital, if all capital had been produced by the common labour of their parents, those who have actually inherited it must be its rightful owners in fact, because in fact it has been produced by the ability of the exceptional men who left it to them. But the whole of this argument, based on the claims of abstract justice, would avail very little to defend the income of the mere owner of capital if his position rested upon its abstract justice only, and if his right to his income did not form a part of the very conditions that render the production of wealth possible. The part which the right to income from capital plays when the ownership of the capital is divorced from any active employment of it, depends on the fact that the right to income of this kind is what gives to wealth the larger part of its value, and renders the desire of it efficient as a social motive. The ways in which it does this are many and various; and because it is impossible to indicate them in any simple or single formula, certain people may imagine that they have no importance. Such people might as well argue that no complicated process is an important process, or that no results are necessary when many causes combine to produce them.