And now I hear you say “My gracious goodness me, what on the face of the earth has all this to do with the possession of spare money by ordinary ladies and gentlemen, which you say is all that Capitalism is?” And I reply, farfetched as it may seem, that it is out of that innocent looking beginning that our huge burden of poverty and misery and drink and crime and vice and premature death has grown. When we have examined the possibilities of this apparently simple matter of spare money, _alias_ Capital, you will find that spare money is the root of all evil, though it ought to be, and can be made, the means of all betterment. What is spare money? It is the money you have left when you have bought everything you need to keep you becomingly in your station in life. If you can live on ten pounds a week in the way you are accustomed and content to live, and your income is fifteen pounds a week, you have five pounds spare money at the end of the week, and are a capitalist to that amount. To be a capitalist, therefore, you must have more than enough to live on. Consequently a poor person cannot become a capitalist. A poor person is one who has less than enough to live on. I can remember a bishop, who ought to have known better, exhorting the poor in the east end of London, at a time when poverty there was even more dreadful than it is at present, to become capitalists by saving. He really should have had his apron publicly and officially torn off him, and his shovel hat publicly and officially jumped on, for such a monstrously wicked precept. Imagine a woman, without enough money to feed her children properly and clothe them decently and healthily, letting them starve still more, and go still more ragged and naked, to buy Savings Certificates, or to put her money in the Post Office Savings Bank and keep it there until there is enough of it to buy stocks and shares! She would be prosecuted for neglecting her children: and serve her right! If she pleaded that the bishop incited her to commit this unnatural crime, she would be told that the bishop could not possibly have meant that she should save out of her children’s necessary food and clothing, or even out of her own. And if she asked why the bishop did not say so, she would be told to hold her tongue; and the gaoler would be ordered to remove her to the cells.