Therefore if the remaining labourer, now a tenant, is to live as well as he did when he was part owner, and pay the rent, he must work twice as hard as he did before.
Take the field a (Fig. 2). It is divided into two equal parts, and one man tills each half. Remove one man and compel the other to pay half the produce in rent, and you will find that the man who has become landlord now gets as much without working as he got when he tilled half the field, and that the man left as tenant now has to till the whole field for the same amount of produce as he got formerly for tilling half of it.
We see, then, that the landlord is a useless and idle burden upon the worker, and that he takes a part of what the worker alone produces, and calls it rent.
The defence set up for the landlord is (1) that he has a right to the land, and (2) that he spends his wealth for the public advantage.
I shall show you in later chapters that both these statements are untrue.
Let us now turn to the capitalist. What is a capitalist? He is really a money-lender. He lends money, or machinery, and he charges interest on it.
Suppose Brown wants to dig, but has no spade. He borrows a spade of Jones, who charges him a price for the use of the spade. Then Jones is a capitalist: he takes part of the wealth Brown produces, and calls it interest.
Suppose Jones owns a factory and machinery, and suppose Brown is a spinner, who owns nothing but his strength and skill.
In that case Brown the spinner stands in the same relation to Jones the capitalist as the landless labourer stands in to the landlord. That is to say, the spinner cannot get food without money, and he can only get money by working as a spinner for the man who owns the factory.
Therefore Brown the spinner goes to Jones the capitalist, who engages him as a spinner, and pays him wages.