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Excerpt from The Nature and Necessity of Interest
Cause with the abolition of interest and the whole modern discussion of the Social Question has, mainly in consequence of this error, become so interwoven with allusions to the effects of interest and the right or wrong of it, that we cannot, at the present moment, enter on any investigation of the wages question without stumbling at almost every step on the problem of interest. This shows, per haps better than anything else, the eminently practical value of a right theory of interest.
To write such a theory has seemed to me of such paramount importance that I have felt justified in devoting to the task the greater part of the last six years. The final issue of these efforts is given in the present volume. Some preliminary results have been published already; and for the more intricate questions of the theory, the reader is referred to these publications. The work that has to be gone through, in order to get to the bottom of the interest question, is not always of the very lightest kind; but I have endeavoured to make the present exposition of the matter as simple as possible, and I have not included in the text anything that might prove an obstacle to the ordinary reader.
I have devoted the first chapter to a survey of the historical development of the theory of interest. In this I have not tried to give anything like a complete history of the problem, my main purpose being to state the results hitherto obtained, and in this way to make the present investigation profit by the efforts of three centuries.
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