therefore not of the nature of a monopoly toll. It is a payment for service rendered. This we may call pure interest. Risk may determine its amount, but no consideration but this can justify its existence."
Thus the troubled capitalist who is wondering whether he is really a thief will be relieved to find that he is acquitted by Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, a keen and uncompromising Socialist, of the charge made against him by Mr. Cole and the other Guildsmen. On the other hand, he is apparently condemned by Mr. Bernard Shaw in the chapter quoted above from the Fabian Essays. "If," he says, "a railway is required, all that is necessary is to provide subsistence for a sufficient number of labourers to construct it. If, for example, the railway requires the labour of a thousand men for five years, the cost to the proprietors of the site is the subsistence of one thousand men for five years. This subsistence is technically called capital. It is provided for by the proprietors not consuming the whole excess over wages of the produce of the labour of their other wage-workers, but setting aside enough for the subsistence of the railway makers. In this way capital can claim to be the result of saving, or, as one ingenious
