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 apologist neatly put it, the reward of abstinence—a gleam of humour which still enlivens treatises on capital. The savers, it need hardly be said, are those who have more money than they want to spend; the abstainers are those who have less. At the end of five years the completed railway is the property of the capitalists, and the railway makers fall back into the labour market as helpless as they were before. . . . Colloquially, one property with a farm on it is said to be land yielding rent; whilst another, with a railway on it, is called capital yielding interest. But economically there is no distinction between them when they once become sources of revenue. This would be quite clearly seen if costly enterprises like a railway could be undertaken by a single landlord on his own land out of his own surplus wealth. It is the necessity of combining a number of possessors of surplus wealth. . . that modifies the terminology and external aspect of the exploitation. But the modification is not an alteration; shareholder and landlord live alike on the produce extracted from their property by the labour of the proletariat."

Again, a variation on the same theme was produced by Ruskin in Fors Clavigera, when