Income from capital was supposed to be used in healthy ways, to pay for good works, for example, and certainly not to launch into commercial or financial adventures that might lead to estrangement from the true faith. Landed capital was in this respect very reassuring, since it could do nothing but reproduce itself year after year and century after century.31 Consequently, the whole social and spiritual order also seemed immutable. Land rent, before it became the sworn enemy of democracy, was long seen as the wellspring of social harmony, at least by those to whom it accrued.
