The differences are all negative; differences of more or less: more or less production, more or less saving, or none at all. With the Physiocrats, for example, it would not disturb the financial status either of the landlords and farmers or of the State, if the manufacturers, merchants, and artisans all went and hanged themselves; for then the former could save more, precisely as if they sold their carriage horses, or dismissed their liveried servants; and the State would be the richer in consequence. With Adam Smith, these manufacturers, merchants, and artisans are less absolutely valueless, because he has proved that they can and do save something out of their earnings, and so increase the wealth of the country.

But not only are the differences of principle between them purely negati\e: the systems themselves are both alike built on negations. In the system of the Physiocrats, the landlords and fanners alone are 'productive,' the rest of the population are altogether barren and 'unproductive' - mere negations. But the system of Adam Smith is equally built on a negation, as we should know beforehand from his confidently expressed dictum, that "Parsimony and not Industry is the immediate cause of the increase of capital" - of a nation as of an individual. The central principle common to both, namely that it is only in Agriculture and not in Manufactures that the powers of Nature come to the assistance of man, is the direct negation of the part played by those powers of Nature, like steam and electricity, which 'since his time have not merely modified, but transformed and recreated the modern industrial world from a new centre of gravity and a new organizing principle. This doctrine, again, is negative, inasmuch as it leads them both logically to the conclusion that the classes that have not been able to capture and appropriate these powers of Nature, but have to do everything by their own unaided exertion, must be dependent on those who have; and must be either partially or altogther kept by them, in the sense in which horses and dogs are kept by their masters.

With the Physiocrats, they are absolutely kept by the landlords, after the farmers have first taken out their share of the product; with Adam Smith, they are only partially so; the manufacturers keeping themselves out of their own savings, and then out of the balance of these savings still left over, keeping the artisans and labourers; precisely as in the Modern Orthodox Economy, which has developed in a straight line from the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. In both systems, again, Consumption as a necessary factor is quite ruled out or orignored, as indeed it must be when the bulk of the consuming classes are represented as either wholly or partially kept by the producing classes.

With the Physiocrats, as we have said, it would almost have been a providential dispensation if the labourers had gone and hanged themselves, and so not decreased the wealth either of the nation or the landlords by their consumption; with Adam Smith, they were tolerated and even encouraged, so long as they were able to save something, however little, over and above what they consumed. It never seems to have occurred to either of them that if products were not consumed by somebody, the powers of Nature would not be brought into play to yield a surplus to lie either on the landlords' or the manufacturers' hands, after they had had all they required for themselves. It is always assumed that there will be consumers somewhere (usually 'in foreign parts'), much as men always assume that there is a heaven for them somewhere; though why consumers as such should be welcomed anywhere, when in the same breath they are told that the less they consume, or the more they save, the better it will be for the wealth of the world, nowhere appears.

The truth is, both these systems are founded on the old symbol of the rod or stick on which we have already dilated at so great length in the earlier part of this volume, and to which nothing more than bare reference need be made when used in future arguments; - the doctrine namely which proceeds by breaking up what is actually a continuous movement into a series of definite time units, in each of which a definite amount of wealth or capital is postulated as functioning; the more wealth that is saved during one unit, the more capital that is appropriated for one undertaking, the less being left for another. That Adam Smith's system is based throughout on this symbol, - instead of on the entirely different one of a continuously revolving wheel, whereby the more wealth that is being consumed (within the limits imposed by the state of the agricultural and mechanical arts of the time) the more will be reproduced, the more capital that is set aside for one undertaking (provided only that the undertaking is reproductive) the more, and not the less, wealth will be set free for all other investments of capital; - that the system of Adam Smith, I say, is built throughout on the symbol of the stick, is nowhere more clearly seen than in his chapters on the Colonial Trade, where all the separate doctrines in his book, brought up as contingents, are massed and concentrated on the one object of annihilating the arguments used by his opponents in support of the monopoly of that trade which England then enjoyed, of destroying that monopoly, and of throwing open the trade to the whole world; - and this, be it observed, not because it would increase the wealth of the world in general by liberating its industrial currents, or the wealth of the Colonies in particular by giving them more and better markets for their goods, (both defensible propositions), but distinctly and avowedly for the sole reason that the abolition of the monopoly would increase the wealth of England herself.