But that does not prevent me from defending a brother of the East End against a brother of the West End. Truly we should love all men. Let us, then, begin by loving the weakest and the worst, for they have so little love and counsel, while the rich and the good have so much. We will not, Mr. Smith, accuse the capitalist of base conduct. But we will say that as a money-lender his rate of interest is too high, and that as a manager his salary is too large. And we will say that if by combining we can, as workers, get better wages, and as buyers get cheaper goods, we shall do well and wisely to combine. For it is to our interest in the one case, as it is to the interest of the capitalist in the other case, to "buy in the cheapest market and to sell in the dearest." So much for the capitalist; but, before we deal with the landlord, we have to consider another very important person, and that is the inventor, or brain-worker. CHAPTER IV THE BRAIN WORKER, OR INVENTOR It has, I think, never been denied that much wealth goes to the capitalist, but it has been claimed that the capitalist deserves all he gets because wealth is produced by capital. And although this is as foolish as to say that the tool does the work and not the hand that wields it, yet books have been written to convince the people that it is true. Some of these books try to deceive us into supposing that capital and ability are interchangeable terms. That is to say, that "capital," which means "stock," is the same thing as "ability," which means cleverness or skill. We might as well believe that a machine is the same thing as the brain that invented it. But there is a trick in it. The trick lies in first declaring that the bulk of the national wealth is produced by "ability," and then confusing the word "ability" with the word "capital." But it is one thing to say that wealth is due to the man who _invented_ a machine, and it is quite another thing to say that wealth is due to the man who _owns_ the machine. In his book called _Labour and the Popular Welfare_, Mr. Mallock assures us that ability produces more wealth than is produced by labour. He says that two-thirds of the national wealth are due to ability and only one-third to labour. A hundred years ago, Mr. Mallock says, the population of this country was 10,000,000 and the wealth produced yearly; L140,000,000, giving an average of L14 a head. The recent production is L350,000,000 for every 10,000,000 of the population, or L35 a head. The argument is that _labour_ is only able to produce as much now as it could produce a hundred years ago, for labour does not vary. Therefore, the increase from L14 a head to L35 a head is not due to labour but to machinery. Now, we owe this machinery, not to labour, but to invention. Therefore the various inventors have enabled the people to produce more than twice as much as they produced a century back.