at once to deal practically with all these vital issues.
A coöperative village is quick to learn that all its inhabitants create their ground rent and therefore rent should go to their community and not to any speculating individual. They are as quick to learn that private interest on money is quite another matter. They learn that, at least under capitalism, it has its uses. They learn that if ever interest is to pass away, it cannot be until capital is far more widely diffused than now.
They learn to drop empty and barren formulas like "money cannot breed money" and face the plain fact. "Shall I lend my savings of 100 francs to the Coöperative? Our manager needs it and asks me for it. If I lend it to him to carry on the work of the store, I meantime cannot use it; neither can I get anything from it in the bank where I now get three per cent."
In exactly these terms, I have heard Belgian and Danish Socialists talk about interest. They learned thus intimately to face one of the great questions on which the future of Socialism will turn. Even if interest and profits are now necessary evils under the perversions of capitalism—can they be altogether dispensed with under Socialism? Or will interest and profits, stripped of present abuses, still have such utilities in so stimulating savings as to justify their continued use, even when the monopolies have been socialized? That Syndicalism at its highest should have recognized an ideal so admirable puts it safely beyond cheap and sniffy criticism. That such ideal should have developed where the movement is oldest,
