But, you will say, only an exceptionally able and hardworking woman of business could plan all this and superintend its carrying-out. Suppose she were too stupid or too lazy to think of these things, or a genius occupied with art or science or religion or politics! Well, if only she had the spare money, hungry women and men with the requisite ability would come to her and offer to develop her estate and to pay her so much a year for the use of her land and of her spare money, arranging it all with her solicitor so that she would not have to lift her little finger in the matter except to sign her name sometimes. In business language, she could invest her capital in the development of her estate. Now consider how much further these operations can be carried than the mere investment of one lady’s savings, and the development of one lady’s estate in the country. Big companies, by collecting millions of spare subsistence in small or large sums from people all over the country who are willing to take shares according to their means, can set the hungry to dig those mines that run out under the sea and need twenty years work before the coal is reached. They can make railways and monster steamships; they can build factories employing thousands of men, and equip them with machinery; they can lay cables across the ocean: there is no end or limit to what they can do as long as they can borrow spare food enough for the hungry men until the preparations are finished and the businesses begin to pay their own way. Sometimes the schemes fail, and the owners of the spare food lose it; but they have to risk this because, as the food will not keep, they would lose it all the same if they did not invest it. So there is always spare money being offered to the big men of business and their companies; and thus our queer civilization, with its many poor and its few rich, grows as we see it with all its shops, factories, railways, mines, ocean liners, aeroplanes, telephones, palaces, mansions, flats, and cottages, on top of the fundamental sowing and reaping of the food that it all depends on. Such is the magic of spare subsistence, called capital. That is how idle people who have land and spare subsistence become enormously rich without knowing how, and make their babies enormously rich in their cradles, whilst the landless penniless persons who do it all by slaving from dawn to dusk are left as poor at the end of the job as they were at the beginning. 35 LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM Many people are so impressed with the achievements of Capitalism that they believe that if you overthrow it you overthrow civilization. It seems to them indispensable. We must therefore consider, first, what are the disadvantages of this way of doing it? and, second, is there any other way?