of land or to allow interest on money, since both were by the
same title payment for privilege, indemnity for loan. It
required more than fifteen centuries to get this idea accepted,
and to reassure the consciences that had been terrified by the
anathemas pronounced by Catholicism against usury. But finally
the weight of evidence and the general desire favored the
usurers: they won the battle against socialism; and from this
legitimation of usury society gained some immense and
unquestionable advantages. Under these circumstances socialism,
which had tried to generalize the law enacted by Moses for the
Israelites alone, Non foeneraberis proximo tuo, sed alieno, was
beaten by an idea which it had accepted from the economic
routine,-- namely, farm-rent,--elevated into the theory of the
productivity of capital.

But the economists in their turn were less fortunate, when they
were afterwards called upon to justify farm-rent in itself, and
to establish this theory of the product of capital. It may be
said that, on this point, they have lost all the advantage they
had at first gained against socialism.

Undoubtedly--and I am the first to recognize it--the rent of
land, like that of money and all personal and real property, is a
spontaneous and universal fact, which has its source in the
depths of our nature, and which soon becomes, by its natural
development, one of the most potent means of organization. I
shall prove even that interest on capital is but the
materialization of the aphorism, ALL LABOR SHOULD LEAVE AN
EXCESS. But in the face of this theory, or rather this fiction,
of the productivity of capital, arises another thesis no less