It does not follow, for example, that because you can put a tax on a commodity or person - on landlords, or tenants, on capitalists or labourers, on luxuries or necessities, on drink, newspapers, credit notes, armorial bearings, dogs, matches, or what not - that these may all be regarded, as one might be inclined to think, as separate items of the nation's income. It is true that they all represent the incomes of individuals, but so far from being all alike elements in the nation's income, it is more than probable, as we have seen from our discussion in a preceding chapter, that one half are already included in the other half, and that the real income and savings of the nation are being taxed over and over again; quite as much so, indeed, as if you added to the list, taxes also on red-haired people or on dark, on those over six feet high and those under, on the very old or the very young. For taxation as such belongs to the domain of Politics and of Political Power, and is as capricious and unpredicable as the weather or the seasons, and has in consequence no more to do with Political Economy as a Science than highway robbery has to do with legitimate business.

It concerns Political Economy only when the question is asked as to what effect this or that tax will have in accelerating or slowing the wheel of wealth; in the same way as oil or sand only touch the science of Mechanics when it is asked what effect they will respectively have on the movements of a machine when inserted between its wheels. In saying this, I am not holding a brief for Political Economy as an academic specialism; on the contrary it is one of the main objects of this work, as will appear in future chapters, to enforce the doctrine that when you come to action you can no more cut Political Economy as an academic specialism out of the living tissue of Civilization as a whole, or general Sociology, than you can Psychology. Politics, Ethics, or Morality.

Summing up so far, then, we may say that while the individuals that make up a nation can accumulate savings and increase their wealth out of any and every economic commodity, whether it be gold, or credit notes, or fixed capital, or consumable goods, or slaves, or cattle, old clothes, damaged fruit, refuse, and even excreta; and while taxes may be raised on all these and on every quality, condition, and class of person as well; the savings of a nation as a whole, if it stood alone by itself in the world, and therefore of the world itself conceived as a single whole, could only come out of, firstly, those forms of fixed capital which, when wear and tear are provided for, possess the economic attributes of permanency, and of emitting economic powers as free gifts over and above the human labour spent on them; and secondly, out of the entire labour and skill of the Working Population engaged in production, as embodying that subdivision of these powers of Nature which we have placed under the category of powers of Man. But with this proviso, that all consumers shall be regarded as producers as well; for all who are not such, are a tax on the national savings, and like the sick, the aged, and the incapable, are the subject-matter of Politics and Legislation and are not properly speaking on the wheel of wealth at all, as subject-matter for the Science of Political Economy. On the other hand we have seen that the other half of the wheel which deals with Consumption, and comprises the entire aggregate of consumable goods which are continually issuing from this fixed capital of a nation and its population of workers, is already implicitly contained in the fixed capital, the inventor's genius, and the workmen's skill, being but transformations of these into consumable forms; and so cannot as a national asset (on our present assumption that a nation stands alone in the world) be counted twice over.

But as no nation really does stand alone in the world, but only exists side by side with other nations with whom it is in trade relations, we now find ourselves confronted with a series of fresh complications more involved than ever, and which will require a fresh series of chapters to elucidate them and to draw them out into separate skeins, before the process of generalising the whole and reconstructing it in terms of our symbol, the wheel of wealth, can begin. To these fresh aspects of our subject, then, we have now to address ourselves. But we cannot do so with effect until we have settled the question as to how gold and silver, credits, bank notes, etc., relate themselves to our wheel of wealth, and where they are to find their proper place on it or around it; as well as the more important question of whether in a nation standing by itself (or the world as a single whole) they are to be added to the nation's (or the world's) assets, or are already included in its fixed capital and its working population.