both in the views they express and in their indignation. But while most of them belong to the conventionally 'educated' classes, it never enters their heads to question the validity of their prime assumption that they themselves or their fathers have 'made' these fortunes. A. is a successful industrialist who has built up and conducted a profitable business from which he draws a large income. This income is due to his enterprise, skill, and industry. Others, no doubt, have helped him to produce the goods upon the sale of which his profits depend. But he pays these others their market value in salaries and wages as he pays all other costs of production. The bulk of the money he receives from the sale of his product goes in defraying these costs. Any surplus, i.e. profit, belongs to him as entrepreneur and capitalist. If others are shareholders in his enterprise, part of the profit 'belongs' to them. They have made it by the use of their capital, or the skill of their investment. This is how the affair appears to him.
But the growing tendency in business is for the active entrepreneur to borrow most of the money capital he requires at fixed interest. On this basis it seems clearer than ever that the large income and fortune which a prospering business secures for him is of his own making. Indeed, he can often trace it to particular acts of skilled judgment and enterprise upon his part, and he is conscious that any error of judgment upon his part might have converted his profit into a loss.
What, then, is the fallacy in his conviction that his
