The method of rating makes every rate a roughly graduated income tax. How the ratepayers are exploited. Illustrations: the charwoman, the Dock Companies, and the Drink Trade. The Poor Law, Municipal trading, and the Post Office as instruments of exploitation. 117 32 YOUR RENT Rent is the most simple and direct form of exploitation. Difference between house rent and cost of house. Ground rents in great cities. Powers of life and death and of exile enjoyed by landlords. Sheep runs. Deer forests. The value of all improvements is finally appropriated by the landlords. The Single Tax. 122 33 WHAT CAPITAL IS Definition of Capital. Spare money. Pathological character of Capitalist civilization. Wickedness of preaching thrift to the poor. Capital, being perishable, must be consumed promptly, disappearing in the process. Danger of Hoarding. Instability of money values. Inflation. Debasing the currency. Constant expenditure necessary. 127 34 INVESTMENT AND ENTERPRISE The nature of investment. Not deferred consumption, but transferred and postponed claim to be fed. Exploitation of the hungry by the intelligent. Estate Development. Illustrative case of a country house and park developed into a suburb. Proprietors without the necessary business ability can hire it. Big business. The magic of capital. 131 35 LIMITATIONS OF CAPITALISM Capital is indispensable to civilization; but its private appropriation is finally a hindrance to it, and perverts the order of its application. Examples: Distilleries _versus_ lighthouses and harbors. Error of assuming that low prices with large sales are more profitable than high prices with restricted sales. Cases in point: telegraph and telephone services. Snowball letters. Commercial profit is no index to social utility. 113 36 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Capital, though beginning at the wrong end, is driven finally to the right end. Invention and inventors. Labor-saving machinery. Power: water, steam, and electric. Handmade and machine-made goods. Cheapness. The industrial revolution, though it has wrought evil, is not evil in itself. Retrogression is neither possible nor desirable. 137 37 SENDING CAPITAL OUT OF THE COUNTRY Capital has no country, being at home everywhere. Restrictions on trade at home, however beneficial, drive it abroad. Example: the trade in intoxicating drink may be driven to Africa by high excise in England and prohibition in America. Superior attraction of the slave trade. Suppression of slave trading followed by indirect enforcement of compulsory labor by means of hut taxes and the like. Development of other countries by English capital accompanied by neglect of home industrial resources and of the improvement of our towns. The foreign competition of which capitalists complain is often created by their own exports of capital. 140 38 DOLES, DEPOPULATION, AND PARASITIC PARADISES