Now Mr. Shaw says that my great mistake has relation to these _five hundred million pounds_. He says that, having argued rightly enough that _two hundred million pounds_ or so are the genuine product or rent of actual and indispensable Ability, I have committed the absurd mistake of confusing with this rent of ability, the rent of land, of houses, and above all, the interest on capital. “Mr. Mallock,” he says, “is an inconsiderate amateur, who does not know the difference between profits and earnings on the one hand, and rent and interest on the other.” And he summarises my views on the subject by saying, that I “see in every railway shareholder the inventor of the locomotive or the steam-engine,” and that I gravely maintain that the _three hundred thousand pounds_ a year which may form the income of one or two great urban landlords is produced by the exercise of some abnormal ability on their parts. This supposed doctrine of mine forms the main subject of Mr. Shaw’s attack. He is exuberantly witty on the subject. He turns the doctrine this way and that, distorting its features into all sorts of expressions, laughing afresh each time he does so. He calls me his “brother” and his “son”; he quotes nursery rhymes at me. He alludes to my own income and the income of the Duke of Westminster, and intimates a desire to know whether the Duke being, so he says, many hundred times as rich as myself, I am many hundred times as big a fool as the Duke. In fact, he has recourse to every argumentative device which his private sense of humour and his excellent taste suggest. The immediate answer to all this is very simple—namely, that I never gave utterance to any such absurdity as Mr. Shaw attributes to me, but that, on the contrary, I have insisted with the utmost emphasis on this very distinction between profits and earnings, and rent and interest, which he assures his readers I do not even perceive. Mr. Shaw, therefore, has devoted most of his time to trampling only on a misconception of his own. This is the immediate answer to him; but there is a further answer to come, relating to the conclusions I drew from nature of rent and interest, after I had pointed out their contrast to the direct receipts of Ability. Let me show the truth of the immediate answer first.