Another objection to our doctrine may take the form of the query; - How if each consumer on the wheel is not necessarily a producer as well, but if on the contrary great numbers of the population are consumers only, not producers; - do their incomes rise and fall with the rest of the community? And if not, why not? The answer again is simple; these men, however excellent in other respects, are economically speaking not on the existing wheel of wealth at all; they may, or indeed must, have been once, or their fathers before them, but for the present they rather stand around it like tax-collectors taking tribute from it; and whether they get more or less from it than is their due, or whether what they get shall keep step with the general increase or decrease of wealth, is a matter for the legislator, not for the political economist. It is the same too with the question of Population when it has been allowed to exceed the numbers that can be effectively employed in productive labour where the fixed capital of a country is working at its highest possible speed, and is being taxed to its utmost resources.

For here again numbers of people are virtually consumers only, and (when work has to be found for them) not full and effective producers; and so far are a pure tax on the economic powers of the country, - the subject of Politics and Legislation, but not of Political Economy. They are no more the subject matter of Political Economy, indeed, than a man's personal or household expenses are a part of his proper business or profession.

The above instances I have noted in passing merely to show that the attempt to get a Science of Political Economy out of a conglomerate mass of Politics and Political Economy (as the Orthodox Economists have tried to do) where the Politics depend on the caprices of mere Power as such, - political, social, or industrial, - while the Political Economy is a question of scientific Law, is an impossibility.

Leaving our demonstration, therefore, where it stands for the present, namely that the sole natural law of the distribution of wealth in a pure science of Political Economy is that the wealth of all classes tends to rise and fall together; and contrasting it with the opposite doctrine of the Orthodox Economists, namely that as the one rises the others must fall, I would again lay emphasis on the difference that is made in the truth or falsehood of every proposition of a deductive science according to the character of the original symbol or formula from which it starts: whether for instance, as in the present case, it is from the symbol of a continuously running wheel, or, as the Orthodox Economists have it, from a series of rods laid end to end from which fractional parts have to be cut off before the remainder can be added in turn to the next and succeeding rods. And this will explain why it was that in a preceding chapter I laid so much stress on the distinction between a science founded on a number of factors each of which had a positive function, and one founded on factors one or other of which was suppressed, or had assigned to it a negative function only. And the present is a case in point.

For although in itself it would seem to make no difference in the result whether you choose to regard the increase of wealth of a nation as due to the co-operation of two positive factors, production and consumption, or to the balance left over from a positive and negative one, production minus consumption; any more than it does if you regard the number ten as resulting from five plus five, or from fifteen minus five; yet it makes all the difference the moment you try to get it into a concrete mathematical symbol or formula from which logical deductions are to be drawn. In the first case, when wealth is being increased, it will have mounted up like a snowball or rolled itself up like a parti-coloured stair carpet, where each layer added to its circumference will be made up of all parts alike; while if wealth is decreasing, it will melt or unroll itself again with a loss in which all its sides or aspects will participate. But in the second case, on the contrary, where some part has to be cut off and deducted each time, before the balance can be added on to the next, you cannot get a steady increase; for with the consumption neutralizing a part of the production, the wages a part of the profits, and the profits a part of the wages, the less that is cut off each time necessitates that the less will have to be produced next time to make up for it; and our aggregate of wealth, which started out with decent proportions, will in our efforts to increase it by saving, become less and less, tapering at each remove, until it ends in a point; so that if all the world turned misers, the wealth of to-day, as we have seen, would in ten years, say, have reduced itself for each individual to a piece of prairie land, a potato patch, a wigwam, and a bear's skin!

In the present and foregoing chapters we have set down as many perhaps of the principal laws of Political Economy both as a pure and as an applied Science, as it is expedient to set down at this stage of our journey, with no further development of the positions raised than is necessary to avoid confusion and bewilderment; leaving their further explication and development to the succeeding chapters in which we shall have to apply them critically to the successive systems of the Orthodox Economy which we are to pass under review. These systems I propose to divide for the sake of convenience into three; the stage represented by Adam Smith and his predecessors, the Mercantilists and the Physiocrats; the stage dominated by the works of Ricardo and Mill; and the recent and present transitional stages in which the Orthodox Economy, like Orthodox Theology after the Reformation, is seen splitting itself up into a number of subordinate schools, characterised by contradiction and uncertainty, but without any essential change in their critical method or principles. This last stage is represented by such names as those of Jevons, Marshall, Bohm-Bawerk, Clark, and other distinguished exponents belonging to the Austrian and American schools.

Of the thinkers outside the Academic ranks who have been most influential in breaking down the authority and prestige of the Orthodox Economy, the names of Comte, Karl Marx, Henry George, Ruskin, Carlyle, Gunton. J. M. Robertson, and Mr, Hobson, most readily occur to one. But of all these, the only ones who coming to their subject from the inside, as it were, as economic specialists, have reached practically the same general conclusions on many, if not all, of the aspects of our subject, as I have from the outside, - from the standpoint of Civilization in general and Sociology, - are Mr. Gunton, and especially Mr. Hobson; all of which will appear as we pass these writers successively under review.

End Of Book I.