The main value of wealth in the eyes of the great wealth-producer does not consist in its ministering to brief spasms of self-indulgence, but in the fact of its being the foundation of an equable and sustained life, in which the physical pleasures are refined rather than intensified, and the time employed by the majority in producing the necessaries of existence is given not to sloth, but to other kinds of exertion. A life of this kind is impossible except in a society of which a large section not only possesses wealth, but is accustomed to its possession, and is characterised by accomplishments, tastes, principles, and kinds of knowledge, which can be developed and acquired only when the continuance of its possession is assured. In other words, those men on whose exceptional business ability the productive processes of the entire community depend, and who are the cause of growth in the incomes of the mass of the community, just as truly as they are the producers of their own fortunes, are motived to activity less by the desire of the wealth which comes to them day by day through their own direct exertions, and which would cease instantly {321} when these exertions were suspended, than they are by the desire of wealth that shall come to them indirectly, not as the product of their exceptional exertions in the present, but as the product of the accumulated product of their exceptional exertions in the past—the product of those stored-up forces with which they have enriched the world, and which, whilst rendering help to thousands of men besides, will continue to render a tribute to their creators and their creators’ children. Thus, to express the matter in brief and familiar language, the sustained development and exercise of exceptional ability in wealth-production implies the possession by those who monopolise this ability, not merely of that portion of those products which are called the wages of superintendence, but also to that portion which is called interest on capital. For just as the control of capital affords the only means by which, under free institutions, the great man can apply his faculties so as to increase the production of wealth, so does the right to interest, or to the products of the capital accumulated by him, constitute the chief reward by the desire of which the exercise of his faculties is stimulated.