For how, for example, can we imagine Population to be increasing and yet Capital and Invention stationary, when the effect of an increased population is to increase the capital drawn from their labour, and to stimulate invention to enable it to produce things at the least cost? How, indeed, unless you have mixed up some political law or tax with the argument, which will prevent this natural result, but which belongs to the art of expediencies of Politics, and not to the Science of Political Economy! Or, again, how can we imagine that when Capital is increasing, Population and Invention can be standing still, when the normal effect of an increase of Capital is an increase of products, and of products an increase of population keeping pace with them, together with improvements and inventions as well? Or thirdly, how can we conceive of Population and Capital both increasing, and yet Invention standing still, unless improvements and new processes are forbidden by custom or religion, or prevented by tyranny or extortion, or other intrusions of outside laws or powers? Or lastly, how can inventions and improvements be assumed to be progressing, and yet Capital and Population to remain stationary, when the very first effect of an invention is an increase of production, and of an increase of production an increase of the capital which comes from it, as well as of the population which naturally attends it; unless again, the increase of capital is lopped off by taxation, or the population is kept down, as in France, by prudential motives growing-out of the laws of inheritance, or, as elsewhere, by marriage laws which have the same effect, - all of which are matters of Politics and political expediency, the subject-matter of legislation and not of a science of Political Economy. The truth is, you might as well expect to draw scientific conclusions on the distribution of wealth from mixing up War with Economics, where the distribution takes place according to the will and caprice of the conqueror, as from a medley of political and economic factors welded into unnatural combinations as fantastic and impossible, in the strictly economic sense, as are these of Mill. It would be easy, again, to show that Capital might remain stationary when Population was increasing, if you allowed governments to skim off all excess of income over a rigidly defined amount by a tax which would crop all overgrown incomes to a level, like a hedgerow; or again, to show that Population might remain stationary when Capital was increasing, if you made a law that all excess of children born yearly over the prescribed number should be put into a lethal chamber.

These would be purely political results from which, it is evident, no laws of political economy could be deduced. Now had Mill not split the wheel of wealth into two, and thrown one half of it (the Consumption half) away, before setting out, but had divided his subject-matter simply and naturally into Production and Consumption, taking as the factors of Production its natural divisions into the Powers of Nature and the Powers of Man, and representing Consumption as strictly co-ordinated with it, he would have seen, as we have demonstrated sufficiently in our early chapters, that not only must Capital, Population, and Inventions, increase or decrease together as the wheel increases or slackens its speed; but that Rent, Profit, and Wages, also must all rise or fall together; of which fact, indeed, as we have already said, the universal experience of the world in all ages, in what is known as good or bad times, practically gives us proof; and that not only is no other law of the distribution of wealth possible in a pure Science of Political Economy, but that there is no other law of distribution on which a practical Art of Political Economy can be based; - all unnatural combinations like those he suggests being palpably due to the action of politicians, legislators, or conquerors, who like mischievous boys have for their own private ends inserted obstructive pebbles at this or that point between the wheels.

He would have seen, in short, that he was trying to found the laws of the physiology of his science on casual factors in its pathology, instead of explaining these facts of its pathology by the known laws of its physiology; with the result that he has not only muddled the science which he was seeking to irradiate, but has falsified its laws and practical conclusions as well.

But these unnatural combinations are not the only examples of the confusion into which Mill has fallen through mixing Politics and Economics together, and treating them as if they were the natural offspring of the pure laws of Political Economy. He has also confused the subject by playing fast and loose with the areas which he selects for his illustrations and examples. If, for example, you take France as a self-enclosed unit cut off from the rest of the world, you may show that while capital is progressing, population is stationary, but if you take as your unit the whole of the foreign lands through which her productions circulate, you will find that this increase of capital in France has made provision for a corresponding increase of population abroad, through the increase of labour which it has set in motion to pay for these productions. On the other hand, a progressive increase of population may co-exist with almost a stagnation of the capital belonging to the nation, as in the early days of America and the Colonies, where the increase of population was largely helped by the capital which, although invested there, was owned by England; or as in the Roman Empire, where the vast populations of the provinces were maintained by the capital, not of these provinces, but of financiers who were citizens of Rome. It is the same with Invention, and improvements in the arts of production; and we can readily understand how great an increase of population was made possible in Japan, for example, when she adopted the arts, the inventions, and the civilization of the Western World. But Mill, by at one point admitting the area covered by foreign commerce into his argument, and at another excluding it, has falsified all the laws and deductions which he has founded on this procedure.

It was open to him either to select a single self-enclosed area or nation as his unit of investigation, or a world of nations trading with each other, but it was not open to him to step from one to the other and back again as it suited his argument. Had he done so consciously it would have gravely impugned the high impartiality which he owed to himself as a philosopher, but of this no one could accuse him. It confirms, rather, Carlyle's estimate of the 'saw-dustish' nature of his intellect and his want of penetration, in spite of his scrupulous intellectual candour and his great logical, as distinct from his purely intellectual, power.

As a further proof of this want of penetration, take the third great cardinal error in his system, namely his making the laws of Political Economy play between, and rest upon, two categories so shifting and uncertain in their incidence and operation as the cloudland of Rent on the one hand, and the quagmire of Population on the other. For if we consider it, the laws of each of these factors will cut both ways according to circumstances; and yet what have circumstances to do with the eternal laws of Political Economy? If one man, for example, owned all the land of the world, he could bleed both capital and labour until, as in the excited vision of Henry George, he had driven them into the sea or compelled them to live on little more than the roots and herbs which they could pick up by the wayside. If, on the other hand, the land of the world were entirely parcelled out into petty peasant properties of three to five or twenty acres each, as in France, giant capitals concentrated in single hands could skin them so effectually of their profits and wages alike, that they, instead of the capitalists, would have to turn out into the highways and slums of the world, to live on what crumbs they could pick up from their masters' table; as, indeed, not only the condition of the peasantry in many Continental and Oriental countries under the power of the money-lenders, but even of stalwart American farmers with their hundred-and-sixty acre freehold farms, squeezed by the Beef and other Trusts, already gives foretaste and token.