And it is still more remarkable that we can effect an inverse operation, however impossible at first sight this may appear. We can convert into instruments of labour, into railways, into houses, a capital which as yet has no existence—thus making available at once ‹services› which will not be actually rendered till the twentieth century. There are bankers who are ready to make present advances on the faith that workmen and railway travellers of the [p202] third and fourth generation will provide for their payment, and these drafts upon the future are transmitted from hand to hand, without remaining for a moment unproductive. I confess I do not believe that the numerous inventors of artificial societies ever imagined anything at once so simple and so complex, so ingenious and so equitable, as this. They would at once abandon their insipid and stupid utopias if they but knew the fine harmonies of the social mechanism which has been instituted by God. It was a king of Aragon who bethought him what advice he should have given to Providence on the construction of the celestial mechanism, had he been called to the counsels of Omniscience. Newton never conceived so impious a thought. We thus see that all transmissions of services from one point of time or of space to another repose upon this datum, that ‹to accord delay is to render service›; in other words, they repose on the legitimacy of Interest. The man who, in our days, has wished to suppress interest, does not see that he would bring back exchange to its embryo form,—barter, present barter,—without reference either to the future or the past. He does not see that, imagining himself the most advanced, he is in reality the most retrograde of men, since he would reconstruct society on its most primitive model. He desires, he says, ‹mutuality of services›. But he begins by taking away the character of ‹services› exactly from that kind of ‹services› which unite, tie together, and ‹solidarize› all places and all times. In spite of the practical audacity of his socialist aphorisms, he has paid an involuntary homage to the present order of things. He has but one reform, which is negative. It consists in suppressing in society the most powerful and marvellous part of its machinery. I have explained in another place the ‹legitimacy› and ‹perpetuity› of Interest. I shall content myself at present with reminding the reader— ‹1st›, That the legitimacy of interest rests upon the fact that he who ‹accords delay renders service›. Interest, then, is legitimate in virtue of the principle of ‹service for service›. ‹2d›, That the perpetuity of interest reposes on this other fact, that ‹he who borrows must pay back all that he has borrowed at a fixed date›. When the thing lent, or its value, is restored to its owner, he can lend it anew. When returned to him a second time, he can lend it a third time, and so on to ‹perpetuity›. Which of the successive and voluntary borrowers can find fault with this?