The reasons why the right to interest forms, in the eyes of the active producers of capital, the main object of their activity are to be found, firstly, in the facts of family affection, and, secondarily, in those of general social intercourse, which together form the medium of by far the larger part of our satisfactions. In spite of the selfishness which distinguishes so much of human action, a man's desire to secure for his family such wealth as he can is one of the strongest motives of human activity known; and the fact that it operates in the case of many who are notoriously selfish otherwise, shows how deeply it is ingrained in the human character. One of the first uses to which a man who has produced great wealth puts it is in most cases to build a house more or less proportionate to his means; and it is his pride and pleasure to see his wife and children acclimatise themselves to their new environment. But such a house would lose most of its charm and meaning for him if the fortune which enabled him to live in it were to dwindle with each day's expenditure, and his family after his death were to be turned into the street, beggars. If each individual were a unit whose interests ended with himself; if generations were like stratified rocks, superposed one on another but not interconnected; if--to quote a pithy phrase, I do not know from whom--"if all men were born orphans and died bachelors," then the right to draw income from the products of permanently productive capital would for most men lose much of what now makes it desirable.
But since individuals and generations are not thus separated actually, but are, on the contrary, not merely as a scientific fact, but as a fact which is vivid to every one within the limits of his daily consciousness dovetailed into one another, and could not exist otherwise, a man's own fortune, with the kind of life that is dependent on it, is similarly dovetailed into fortunes of other people, and his present and theirs is dovetailed into a general future.
We have seen how this is the case with regard to his own family; but the matter does not end there. Individual households do not live in isolation; and there are for this fact two closely allied reasons. If they did there could be no marriage; there could also be nothing like social intercourse. It is social intercourse of a more or less extended kind that alone makes possible, not only love and marriage, but most of the pleasures that give colour to life. We see this in all ranks and in all stages of civilisation. Savages meet together in numerous groups to dance, like civilised men and women in New York or in London. The feast, or the meal eaten by a large gathering, is one of the most universal of all human enjoyments. But in all such cases the enjoyment involves one thing--namely, a certain similarity, underlying individual differences, between those persons who take part in it. Intimate social intercourse is, as a rule, possible only between those who are similar in their tastes and ideas with regard to the minute details which for most of us make up the tesseræ of life's daily mosaic--similar in their manners, in their standards of beauty and comfort, in their memories, their prospects, or (to be brief) in what we may call their class habituations. This is true of all men, be their social position what it may. It is true, of course, that the quality of a man's life, as a whole, depends on other things also, of a wider kind than these. It depends not only on the fact, but also on his consciousness of the fact, that he is a citizen of a certain state or country, though with most of its inhabitants he will never exchange a word; or that he is a member of a certain church; or that, being a man and not a monkey, his destiny is identified with that of the human species. But, so far as his enjoyment of private wealth is concerned, each man as a rule, though to this there are individual exceptions, enjoys it mainly through the life of his own _de facto_ class--the people whose manners and habits are more or less similar to his own, because they result from the possession of more or less similar means. He is, therefore, not interested in the permanence of his own wealth only. He is equally interested in the permanence of the wealth of a body of men, the life of which must, like that of all corporations, be continuous.