Therefore when I say that Capitalism has reduced our people to a condition of abject helplessness and ignorance in their productive capacity as workers, you cannot reassure me by pointing out that factory girls are no fools when it comes to gossiping and amusing themselves; that they are resourceful enough to learn lip reading in the weaving-sheds, where the banging of the looms makes it impossible to hear each other speak; that their dances and charabanc excursions and whist drives and dressing and wireless concerts stimulate and cultivate them to an extent unknown to their grandmothers; that they consume frightful quantities of confectionery; and that they limit their families to avoid too much mothering. But all this is consumption, not production. When they are engaged in producing these amusements: when they take the money for the tickets at the pay-boxes, or do some scrap of the work of making a charabanc, or wind the wire on a coil for broadcasting, they are mere machines, taking part in a routine without knowing what came before or what is to follow. In giving all the work to one class and all the leisure to another as far as the law will let it, the Capitalist system disables the rich as completely as the poor. By letting their land and hiring out their spare money (capital) to others, they can have plenty of food and fun without lifting their little fingers. Their agents collect the rent for the land, and lodge it in the bank for them. The companies which have hired their spare money lodge the half-yearly hire (dividends) in the same way. Bismarck said of them that they had only to take a pair of scissors and cut off a coupon; but he was wrong: the bank does even that for them; so that all they have to do is to sign the cheques with which they pay for everything. They need do nothing but amuse themselves; and they would get their incomes just the same if they did not do even that. They can only plead that their ancestors worked productively, as if everybody’s ancestors had not worked productively, or as if this were any excuse for their not following their ancestors’ excellent example. We cannot live on the virtues of our grandmothers. They may have farmed their own land, and invented the ways in which their spare money was applied to the land to make them richer; but when their successors found that all this trouble would be taken for them by others, they simply let the land and put out their spare money for hire (invested it).