It follows therefore that the Orthodox Economists are logically bound to deny that the Working Population are an addition to the fixed capital of the nation, but on the contrary are bound to affirm that they are a deduction from it, inasmuch as they are paid out of a part of it which is specially set aside for their keep; that part of the stick, in fact, which has to be lopped off before the rest of it can be fairly set down as an addition to the nation's wealth. Now if I am right in this, nothing can better illustrate the bankruptcy of the Orthodox Economy, or its essential hollowness from roof to foundation. Let us consider it, therefore, a little more closely. It is true, of course, that the working population being at the present day free to come and go as they please, the life of each one of them taken separately, and the chances of his finding continuous work during his ordinary working years, is much too risky an asset to base any but the most limited time-credits upon; but on the other hand when taken in the mass and generalised collectively as 'working population,' the risks and chances of each so balance and neutralise one another as to give them as a mass the relative permanence of a solid body; and not only will insurance companies advance large credits against their generalised incomes, but their productive economic capacity as a whole will be found to be so enormous as to form one of the greatest of national assets, containing in itself as it does the double requisites of a relative permanence, and of being able to liberate economic powers of Nature, - those powers namely which for scientific convenience we have placed under the separate category of powers of Man.

But if it still be questioned whether they are an addition to the fixed capital of a nation, all hesitation on this point will be removed by simply considering what a collapse there would be in all Government Securities if by any chance say one half of the skilled working population were swept away at a stroke by a pestilence or other national calamity. And with this proviso that the working population of a country must be added to its other fixed capital as a national asset, and not deducted from it as an expense only, as is done by the Orthodox Economists, we will leave the matter for the present until we clear up another aspect of it which is essential to the final conclusion towards which we are working. In doing this we shall be enabled as well to add another distinction to those already laid down in our Applied Science of Political Economy; and this will fall most appropriately, perhaps, into its place here.

This distinction is that not only do Production and Consumption involve the same aggregate of commodities drawn from a definite aggregate amount of fixed capital,and variously transformed by that fixed capital at different stages of the wheel as they circulate around it, but the producers and the consumers are, when economically and not politically considered, the tame people, and not distinct and separate divisions of the population. Now the orthodox Economists in many of the most important corollaries which they have drawn from their original stock of first principles, proceed palpably on the idea that the Producers and the Consumers of a nation form two separate and distinct economic divisions of their subject matter; the capitalists in general being identified with the Producers, and the mass of the working population below the line of the rich and luxurious, with the Consumers. But the absurdity of this view that Producers and Consumers are two distinct sets of people, economically considered, only requires to be clearly stated to be seen.

For, if we consider it. each man who takes his place on the wheel of wealth in the morning (and if he does not do so he is either a pensioner, a pauper, an invalid, an incapable, or a Government taxing agent, and so is not on the economic wheel at all) must become a consumer before the evening; so that if we allow the wheel to come round full circle, in order to bring all products to their full completion as consumable goods, not only will it be found that the producers of the morning are the same persons, and not different, as the consumers in the evening, but that their products are the same products which are consumed in the evening; the tailor and shoemaker consuming the baker's products, and the baker the shoemaker's and tailor's, and all alike producing and consuming each other's, whether they are engaged in farming, in manufacturing, in wholesale dealing, transporting, or retailing.

Now what is the reason for this obstinate persistence of the Orthodox Economists in perpetuating the delusion of the Producers and Consumers being two different sets of people? It is because they have mixed up Practical Politics, which is subject to no law but expediency or force, with Political Economy. Because for purposes of taxation, or as a lever for obtaining for the workmen or the capitalists, as the case may be, a larger share in the products of industry, they have been in the habit of dividing the population roughly into a class of consumers, the working class and the poor, and a class of producers, the capitalists, the manufacturers, the middlemen, and the rich generally; because of this, I say, they have slid unconsciouslv into the belief that as this division can be made for political purposes, it can also form a natural division in the subject-matter of Political Economy. But this is a prime fallacy, a confounding of Politics and the distribution of political power with the special Science of Political Economy as such and its laws; and any argument based on it as an integral part of the Science of Political Economy must lead to endless error in theory as well as to endless mischief, as we shall presently see, in practice.