On the other hand, as for the really great men and guiding spirits of a nation in their various departments of thought, under this confused mixture of politics, economics, and philanthropy, it is strongly held by the editors of journals of great influence and authority that not only may the State allow them to exist in a condition of semi-starvation, but that the public may quite conscientiously dismiss their interests from their minds, - provided they can only be kept nicely balanced on that narrow edge overlooking actual starvation which is known as 'genteel poverty,' - inasmuch as that is the condition, so these journalists contend, in which men of genius will always be found to yield their finest fruit, and in which the public will get the best and largest amount of work out of them at the least cost; and in this doctrine, which they are anxious to see carried out, they justify themselves by the physiological analogies of the over-fed fowl which will not lay, and the half starved peasants who when the State is threatened with a future deficiency of population for war, can always be depended on to yield the largest progeny.

Instances of the effects of this doctrine are so frequent in the lives of great inventors, artists, musicians, literary men, and philosophers, that they are always cropping up in the newspapers, and often at the very time when philanthropists are racking their brains to know what they can do to help the derelicts, incapables and street-corner loafers, while obstinately refusing to put out a finger to help the genuine working man. On the other hand, it is equally held by these writers, that politicians, soldiers, lawyers, business men, and the like, (whom, as a solace and flattering sop to the disinherited on the 'genteel poverty' line, they affect to regard as inferior, grosser, and much tougher-fibred mortals!) must be fattened like queen bees and milch cows, with wealth and luxury; and befeathered with titles and the trappings of personal dignity and power; else, say these writers, they will strike work altogether, and the public will suffer; and therefore provision of ample salaries, dignities, and rewards for these, must be made by the State its first consideration and concern.

One such editor, I remember, who consistently preached this doctrine - of genteel poverty and personal renunciation in money matters for great men - in his journal for many years, and never lost an opportunity of punctuating it as often as the occasion arose, (he was greatly distressed, I recollect, when Tennyson, a mere literary man, was raised to the peerage for literary distinction alone); and although he left a large fortune from the profits of the journal which he edited and partly owned, he still continued to preach the doctrine until his death. And I do not question that had he been living to-day, he would have seen without compunction the disgraceful spectacle, as I write, of musicians of high contemporary note reduced, by the piracy of their copyrights, some degrees nearer to the abject starvation line than the particular blend of genteel poverty which he personally preferred; - and that, not more because of the cheapness of the pirated music to the consumer, than as a pledge of the future good work that could be squeezed and wrung out of the poverty of its producers. But this is a digression.

The upshot of it all is, that as each person is in turn a producer and consumer, - a producer of his own work and a consumer of the work of some other man, - this mania whereby all men (or the State) are asked to sacrifice everything to cheapness to the consumer, means that each man must be prepared to sacrifice his own particular instrument of production, like our workman his bag of tools, - and with result, ruin. The fallacy lies in the habit of regarding all people in a way as consumers, while having in mind mainly the great body of the poorer classes with whom one whole side of politics, namely the economic eleemosynary side, is chiefly and indeed rightly concerned; and of identifying the producers with the capitalist class only; whereas the producers include not only the capitalist class, and their great instruments of production, but the entire mass of workers who are necessary to keep these instruments of production working up to their normal level of efficiency. In other words, if we except the pensioners and the paupers, - none of whom can properly be said to be engaged on the wheel of wealth at all, - we shall find, as we have already seen, that the producers and the consumers are one and the same people; and that men never could have fallen into the fallacy of thinking otherwise, were it not that they have confounded this economic division of society in which all are alike producers and consumers, with the quite different division of society for purposes of taxation, - where the producers are identified with the capitalists, and the consumers with the great body of wage earners, as a necessary preliminary to the distributing of the taxes fairly and evenly among the different classes in a nation; - a question of Politics, in a word, not of Economics. But I will go farther and venture to affirm, that there could be no controverted problem of the relative advantages of Free Trade and Protection to discuss, if once the reader would only keep firmly fixed in his mind the fact that economically speaking every producer is also a consumer, every consumer also a producer; for then no one would dream of endangering by foreign competition any instrument of production necessary to the great body of producers, for the purpose merely of making the product cheaper to the same great body as consumers; - any more than they can be brought, on any consideration whatever, to put a tax on any instrument of production as such.