Essays on Scandinavian Literature

"The revolution will always have to be recommenced, so long as we occupy ourselves with consequences only, without having the logic or the courage to attack the principle itself. This principle is capital, false property, interest, and usury, which by the old régime, is made to weigh upon labour. "Ever since the aristocrats invented the incredible fiction, that capital possesses the power of reproducing itself, the workers have been at the mercy of the idle. "At the end of a year, will you find an additional crown in a bag of one hundred shillings? At the end of fourteen years, will your shillings have doubled in your bag? "Will a work of industry or of skill produce another, at the end of fourteen years? "Let us begin, then, by demolishing this fatal fiction." I have quoted the above, merely for the sake of establishing the fact, that many persons consider the productiveness of capital a false, a fatal, and an iniquitous principle. But quotations are superfluous; it is well known that the people attribute their sufferings to what they call the trafficking in man by man. In fact, the phrase, tyranny of capital, has become proverbial. I believe there is not a man in the world, who is aware of the whole importance of this question: -- "Is the interest of capital natural, just, and lawful, and as useful to the payer as to the receiver?" You answer, No; I answer, Yes.