able to save it, the motive of the producers was the desire to live on the interest of it when it was saved; and that if it had not been for the desire, the hope, the expectation of getting this interest, the capital most certainly would never have been produced at all, or, at all events, only a very minute fraction of it. I asked in one of my articles in this Review whether Mr. Shaw thought that a man who received ten thousand a year as the product of his exceptional ability would value this sum as much if he were forbidden by the State to invest a penny of it—if the State, in fact, were an organised conspiracy to prevent his investing it so as to make an independent provision for his family, or for himself at any moment when he might wish to stop working—as he values it now when the State is organised so as to make his investments secure? And the sole indication in the whole of Mr. Shaw’s paper that he has ever realised the existence of the question here indicated is to be found in a casual sentence, in which he says that to think that the complete confiscation of all the capital created by the two past generations, and the avowed intention on the part of the State to confiscate all the capital that is now being created by the present—to think, in other words, that the annihilation of the strongest and fiercest hope that has ever nerved exceptional men to make exceptional industrial exertion, would in the smallest degree damp the energies of any able man—“is an extremely unhistoric apprehension,” and one as to which he “doubts whether the public will take the alarm.” And having said this, he endeavours to justify himself by an appeal to history. He asks if the men who built the Pyramids did not work just as hard “though they knew that Pharaoh was at the head of an organised conspiracy to take away the Pyramids from them as soon as they were made?”