Turning to the Greek world we find usury condemned by Solon and Lycurgus, Plato and Aristotle (“money sterile by nature”); and a Roman voice comes from Cato. From Arabia is heard the word of Mohammed. And, of great Englishmen, we find Lord Bacon, and perhaps Shakespeare, teaching the same. Concerning these it is to be noted, that being before the days of joint company ownership, their testimony was solely against private money-lending; and the one authority, John Wesley, who lived in the early days of modern business, was not against interest as such in his later years. Nor again, did these authorities attack Rent, which Ruskin is consistent in also reprobating. The landowning aristocracy, we shall remember, are to be the recipients instead of a Government annuity, as wages for their work of governing their inferiors. Amongst an agricultural, noncommercial people, the usurer is a sinister figure. This must have been the case in Palestine, and in agricultural England. To-day he is the curse of India, whose cultivators are enslaved by the money-lenders under English law. In short, we may conclude that it requires a fair field and genuine commercial habits to make interest a public benefit. The change from the earlier to the later John Wesley is most significant. It represents the change to modern business on a large scale, which occurred during his lifetime. It is noticeable that since his time the attack on Interest has ceased, but for Ruskin, among religious teachers. As a counsel of ultimate perfection in a communist State, of course, Interest would be abolished; but most Socialists admit that it is an essential part of the institution of private property, and must stand or fall with it. There may yet be great revolutions in our sense of duty. We may come to extend kindness to animals to the extraordinary length of not eating them. That excessive toil and numbing poverty should exist around us, may some day become a reproach to us, as we feed on the roses and lie on the lilies of life, which are often provided for us by the said labourers. By the time, then, that we come to love our neighbours as ourselves, we shall probably not be anxious to take advantage of our position of being a little beforehand with the world, of having money to lend; and may even sink the time advantage thereby at our disposal; and not take interest. But we shall be different then; and so will the world we live in. It is a kind of altruism which absolutely needs a fit environment. If the cessation of income from investments belongs to the Christianity which is to come, before this faith shall have been realized we shall have pooled our property into a common store, and the question of private investment will have fallen to the ground. Only among the Doukhobors has this kind of Christianity yet notably realized itself, and great is their well-being. But we must go on like Ruskin and take our Interest for the present.