factory, and employ workers, then, because the owner of the money
receives his rate of interest he is said to be exploiting labour,
because, so it is alleged, the workers work and he, the capitalist, sits
in idleness and lives on their labour.

And so, in fact, he does. But we have not yet found out how he got the
money that he lent. That money can only have been got by work done or
services rendered, for which other people were ready to pay. Capital,
looked at from this point of view, is simply stored up work, and
entitled to its reward just as much as the work done yesterday. The
capitalist lives on the work of others, but he can only do so because he
has wrought himself in days gone by or because someone else has wrought
and handed on to him the fruits of his labour. Let us take the case of
a shopkeeper who has saved a hundred pounds. This is his pay for work
done and risk taken (that the goods which he buys may not appeal to his
customers) during the years in which he has saved it. He might spend his
hundred pounds on a motor cycle and a side-car, or on furniture, or a
piano, and nobody would deny his right to do so. On the contrary he
would probably be applauded for giving employment to makers of the
articles that he bought. Instead of thus consuming the fruit of his work
on his own amusement, and the embellishment of his home, he prefers to
make provision for his old age. He invests his hundred pounds in the 5
per cent. debenture stock of a company being formed to extend a boot
factory. Thereby he gives employment to the people who build the
extension and provide the machinery, and thereafter to the men and women
who work in the factory, and moreover he is helping to supply other
people with boots. He sets people to work to supply other people's wants
instead of his own, and he receives as the price, of his service five
pounds a year. But it is his work, that he did in the years in which he
was saving, that is earning him this reward.