a parliamentary election men give their votes to one party or another largely as a consequence of their views on such questions as whether tradeunions are trying to win unfair advantages over the employers, or employers to maintain unfair advantages over the men; whether the Government should spend the taxpayers' money chiefly for the benefit of one class or another; and whether, when new taxes are necessary, they should be taken from this class or from that. How we vote often depends largely on our views as to the fairness or unfairness of the way in which is divided up all the wealth that is being produced by the labour and thought of all the workers in the country.

But while we are talking of those who do the calculating and the managing, and those who perform the manual labour, we must not forget the equal importance of a third set-those who have done the necessary saving. For if we all used and enjoyed at once all that we could get with our weekly pounds, shillings, and pence, and never laid any by for future use, then projects like the building of railways could never be undertaken. Saving is at least as necessary as hand labour or brain work.

Let us return to the case of Robinson Crusoe. In what ways would a shipwrecked sailor save, and why should he attempt to do so?

At first we may picture Crusoe as living from hand to mouth. He gathers enough fruit, and collects enough shell-fish, to keep him alive from day to day. But he wishes, let us say, to build a boat or weave a fishing net; and the making of these takes time. Accordingly he works overtime for a few days, climbing trees and searching the

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pools by the sea-shore, and thus succeeds in gathering together a large pile of coconuts and a store of crayfish and mussels. These form his savings, his capital," for the moment; and he is now able to settle down to days of uninterrupted toil at the construction of his net, instead of giving all his efforts to hunting his food. Day by day he consumes his saved food (lives on his capital) until there is none left. But in place of the fruit and the fish he has acquired a new species of " capital," a net, with which in future he hopes to catch far more fish than he ever caught before. The fishing net is the result of his saving-it is his saving in a transferred form. His stock of wealth is now greater, and his daily income of fish is likewise greater than before. He is using the result of his savings, the fishing net, much as the business man uses the machines in his factory. These similarly must be the offspring of people's savings; as are also the factories and workshops themselves, the ploughs and harrows of the farmers, the ships, the railways, the roads and the docks, and all the complex apparatus by which new wealth is for ever being created.

Unless multitudes were continually saving-producing more than they immediately consume (like Robinson Crusoe gathering a store of food), or (what comes to the same thing from the community's point of view) refraining from consuming inherited capital and sternly maintaining it intact nobody could carry out such tasks as the building of railways and the construction of canals that take years to complete. There must be, somewhere, food and clothing in readiness for the navvies to use while they are at work on the railway embankments; and some one, somewhere, must have saved this

(refrained from consuming it when he had the legal power to consume it), and expects to receive a share in the products of the enterprise, in the shape of dividends or interest, for having performed the service of saving.1

Of course the ordinary man in the ordinary world does not and cannot collect his savings in the form of quantities of food and coal and clothing. How then is the saving done ?

For the solution of this problem let us transfer our friend Robinson Crusoe from the tranquil South Seas to the complex world of civilisation, and picture him now as a medical man at the beginning of his career, without any capital other than the "personal capital" of his medical knowledge. As our island Crusoe lived from hand to mouth, swarming up coconut palms and chasing after edible crabs to satisfy the cravings of his appetite; so our civilised Dr. Robinson lives on his narrow daily earnings, racing up and down people's front stairs and chasing after elderly ladies with full purses and dubious nervous systems, in order to gather in likewise his daily harvest of fees. But, if the fees exceed the needs of the hour, he constructs with them what we shall call provisionally (reserving the matter for consideration a few paragraphs later) a pile of entries in a banker's books (Crusoe's pile of fruit and fish), and presently exchanges it for a modern type of fishing net-a motor-car, let us say, with which he can thenceforward catch more fees. The motor-car is now his capital,❞—his first investment. He constructs, more rapidly than before, another pile of bank entries, and exchanges

1 We are not discussing the meritoriousness of this, but referring merely to its social utility.

this for a part of some larger fishing net-a share, let us say, in the Great Northern Railway, which acts like a deep-sea drag net, drawing in fish in the form of freight charges, fines for pulling the communication cord without due cause, the prices of excursion tickets, and so forth-out of which he receives a supplementary income in the shape of railway dividends. And so his life goes on, until his fishing nets, scattered perhaps over all the seas and continents-bonds of a Cuban Telephone Company, Canadian Railway stock, a share in a Japanese War Loan-bring him in such an income of goods and services that he finds himself able to "retire," and he now dreams away the leisurely remainder of his days, lying on his back on the peaceful sands of old age, watching his Man Friday mending his nets for him and hacking steps in the bark of the coconut palms to facilitate the task of gathering the fruit.

But Robinson Crusoe, it should be noted, cannot retire unless his Man Friday keeps still at work. And this is equally true of Dr. Robinson. Dr. Robinson describes himself no doubt as a man of independent means; but his independence is conditioned by the assumption that men in general must continue working; that capital (supplied by himself out of past labour) and labour (supplied now by others) will through the energies of business managers be somehow fitted together, and wealth thereby be produced sufficient to meet the claims of labourer and employer, as well as of himself, the retired investor.

But what really was that mysterious pile of bank entries that we used as a convenient shorthand expression for the first-fruits of Dr. Robinson's saving?

Ultimately it must be, just as in the case of the island Crusoe, a store of fruit and fish, or of coal or hides or wheat or iron-ore, stored somewhere; and this fact it is emphatically necessary to grasp, to grasp firmly, and never let slip. (For my part, when I am reading, say, the more interesting parts of the daily paper-those that deal with the current prices of bills of exchange, stocks and shares, and foreign cheques-watching that perennial game of chess that the financiers are for ever playing, with the whole round world for their many-squared chessboard, I find it well to close my eyes a moment from time to time, and see it all, as it really is, in terms of coal and machinery. I feel safer, if, like Helen's Babies, I insist on seeing the wheels go round," before passing on to the next item.)

When most of us save, we say that we save money. But this is very rarely true, even superficially; for very few of us are coin-collectors. (It would indeed be rather difficult for many of us to become coin-collectors on a large scale. For if all the coin in the United Kingdom were equally divided up among all the inhabitants, it would work out at rather less than £5 per head of the population.) We are more likely to take our coin to a bank; and arrange with the banker to be allowed to have an equal amount back whenever we desire it. We cannot ask for the same money back. For if the banker were expected to take care of our own coins for us he would demand to be paid for the service of safeguarding them. But instead he often consents to pay us "interest" for the use of our savings, which he then lends to business men, asking from them a higher rate of interest. What we lend to the banker, and the banker lends to the business man, is the