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Updated: June 8, 2025
'You, an incarnate sinecure and vested interest, a creature revelling in an unearned income of fabulous Oriental magnificence I dare say, putting one thing with another, fully as much as five hundred a year to ask me, the unbeneficed and insignificant, with my wretched pittance of eighty pounds per annum and my three pass-men a term for classical mods, how I scrape together the few miserable, hoarded ha'pence which I grudgingly invest in my pots and pipkins!
When there is no gain except by production, the whole thought and energy of the man is directed to that end, and his desire to secure that earned by another is restrained. The frank, open disposition is preserved. Honest productive toil drives out the spirit of speculation. Under usury, both lender and borrower are in the attitude of expectants of unearned gain.
Leopold the pleasure-seeker was one person; Leopold the business man was another, and as such he was unique among the rulers of Europe. Leopold contradicted every known tradition of royalty. The king business is usually the business of spending unearned money. Your royal spendthrift is a much more familiar figure than the royal miser.
The Californian is a man from anywhere in America or Europe, typically from New England, perhaps, who has learned a thing or two he did not know in the East, and perhaps, has forgotten some things it would have been as well to remember. The things he has learned relate chiefly to elbow room, nature at first hand and "the unearned increment."
The poor men like me, the peasants from Europe like Magnus we were the ones who made good, while the gentility went bankrupt. After a few years the land began to take on what the economists call "unearned increment," or community value, and the Gowdy lands began the work which finally made him a millionaire; but it was not his work.
"Let us say," I continued, "that you are willing to invest twenty years of your life in a million dollars." Now twenty years of my life to me is worth more than a million dollars. I simply can't afford to sell it for that. I prefer to invest it, as somebody or other has said, unearned in life. I've always had a liking for intangible properties."
I intend to cure you of the work habit. You must learn to scorn it. Look at me. I'm an example of the unearned increment. We'll kiss this dinky flat a fond farewell it's impossible, really I refuse to share such a dark secret with you. To-morrow we leave it for the third and last time. What d'you say to the sunny side of the Ritz until we decide where we want to travel?"
If there were any doubt about the fact that the scholastics recognised the legitimacy of unearned income, it would be dispelled by an understanding of their teaching on rents and partnership, in the former of which they distinctly acknowledged the right to draw an unearned income from one's land, and in the latter of which they acknowledged the same right in regard to one's money. Rent Charges.
"Don't, please, Hilary," he added miserably. "Can't you see...." "See what? I see that; and I see these Urquharts, closely connected with our family, rolling in unearned riches, spending and squandering and wasting and never giving away. I see the Robinsons, our own relations, fattening on the money that ought to have come to us, and now and then throwing us a loan as you throw a dog a bone.
It is perfectly correct to say that the problems which have perplexed modern writers as to the justice of receiving an unearned income from one's property never occurred to the scholastics; such problems can only arise when the institution of private property comes to be questioned; and private property was the keystone of the whole scholastic economic conception.
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