Between the years 1862 and 1885 there were registered in the United Kingdom about _twenty-five thousand_ joint stock companies, with an aggregate Capital of about _two thousand nine hundred million pounds_. Of these companies, by the year 1885, more than _fifteen thousand_ had failed, and less than _ten thousand_ were still existing. During the following four years the proportion of failures was smaller; but a return published in 1889 shows that of all the companies formed during the past twenty-seven years, considerably more than half had been wound up judicially. Therefore a man who secures a large return on money invested in a business not under his own control, does so by an exercise of sagacity not only beneficial to himself, but in a still higher degree beneficial to the country generally; for he has helped to direct human exertion into a profitable and useful channel, whereas those who are less sagacious do but help it to waste itself.[49] Of large returns on Capital, then, only a part is interest; the larger part being merely another name for what we have shown to be the actual creation of Ability—either the Ability with which the Capital has been employed in directing Labour, or the Ability with which some new method of directing Labour has been selected. There is accordingly no contradiction in the two statements that Capital may often bring more than fifteen per cent to the original investors; and yet that interest on Capital in the present day is not more than three or three and a half per cent. Here is the explanation of shares rising in value. A man who at the starting of a business takes _a hundred one pound shares_ in it, and, when it is well established, gets _twenty pounds_ a year as a dividend, will be able to sell his shares for something like _six hundred pounds_; which means that little more than three per cent is the interest which will be received by the purchaser. [Sidenote ◆1 Interest, then, has decreased, and the whole sum thus saved has gone to the labouring classes.]