For we have only to listen to some of the deductions drawn by Mill from this sentence as prologomena and first principles of his system of Political Economy, to judge of what kind of future a nation is likely to be committed, whose economy is built on them from basement to roof.

The first of these fundamental principles is, that 'Industry is limited by Capital,' or in other words, that the amount of wealth production is limited by capital. So far so good, but how much truth does it contain? Clearly only half the truth, for all we have to do is to turn it the other way round, and make it read 'the increase of Capital is limited by Industry,' i.e. by the amount of wealth that is produced, and we have a proposition which is equally true, and the exact opposite of the first! How dangerous a half truth of this kind is likely to prove when erected into a first principle on whose practical deductions a nation is prepared to stake its economic future, needs no enforcing. And all because Mill split the wheel of wealth in two, - into Production and Consumption, and imagined that he could throw away the consumption half with as much impunity as a butcher would the entrails of a sheep, - and yet expect his science to be a living and not a dead one! Now it is Mill's neglect of Consumption, it is to be observed, that makes his statement of his first fundamental principle so inadequate, inasmuch as it is only when things are purchased for consumption that they will continue to be produced, and further, that it is only out of their sale that the capital necessary for their future production or increase can arise.

And the fact that two exactly antithetical propositions may be equally true, but that the whole truth lies in the combination of the two, would itself be a proof that any science which is founded on the one half, after deliberately throwing away the other, must be false.

As further evidence take the second principle, that 'capital is the result of saving,' and it will be found that its opposite is equally true, namely that 'capital is the result of spending'; for if there is no one with purchasing power to buy them, commodities will not be produced, and capital will neither be wanted nor will it accrue. Or, again, take his proposition that 'every addition to Capital gives to Labour either additional employment or additional remuneration,' turn it completely round, and it will be found to be equally true that 'every addition to Wages and Labour gives to Capital either additional employment or additional remuneration'; - additional employment, to keep up the increased demand on it for consumption which an increase of wages involves; additional remuneration, inasmuch as every additional hand employed where it is needed adds something to capital over and above its keep; so that if it is true that wages are limited by capital, it is equally true that capital is limited by wages.

Then take again his much debated proposition that 'a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour,' and again we shall find that its categorical opposite is equally true, and that 'a demand for commodities is a demand for labour,' but for labour at the second remove, as it were; the labour, namely, that is employed by the champagne grower or the velvet manufacturer, to whom the demand for their respective commodities is sent. As for the other implications of this proposition, they all have as their object the demonstrating of the necessity of producing and saving, but not of consuming and spending, for the increase of the wealth of the world; and have already been refuted in our earlier chapters, where we have demonstrated the co-equal necessity of both; and so need no longer detain us.

In the same way, too, the Ricardian proposition of Mill in regard to Kent, namely that it is the extension of the * margin of cultivation ' that is the cause of its increase, may be turned round and its exact converse will be found to be equally true, namely that it is the increase of rent which extends the margin of cultivation; and this, for the simple reason that as land must always be used in connection with capital and labour, and as capital and labour will always give more for land the more it helps them to increase their products, the consequence is that they will want more land, even if it is of a poorer quality; and so it is the increase of rent which they are willing to give that is the cause of the extension of the margin of cultivation, and not vice versa. Again, if we take Mill's demonstration that the tendency of profits in advancing industrial societies is steadily towards a minimum, - say to a profit of one per cent, or less, or perhaps nothing at all, - and premising that it was in the same stage of industrial development as that in which he himself lived that he expected this result to occur, we have only in order to show its falsity as well as that of the system from which it was a deduction, to bring together the two sets of circumstances which he instanced as preventing or retarding this tendency of profits to a minimum, when it will be apparent without further argument how absurd and paradoxical his whole demonstration is.

On the one hand, he asserts that profits will be prevented from falling to a minimum by all that is economically bad, by anything that wastes capital in short, as for example its being blown away in bubble companies, or in war, or in commercial crises, its destruction outright by fire or flood, by the absence of security of property, by corrupt courts of justice, by unsound and risky credits, by the piling up of Government loans, and by a stagnant population. All these, says Mill, will actually make profits rise, or at worst will prevent them from falling to a minimum. This, I imagine, will be news to most business men! On the other hand he declares that profits will rise, or be prevented from falling, by what all will admit to be essentials of a sound and progressive trade, namely inventions and improvements in machinery and productive processes generally, and the reduction in the cost of all things produced by them in consequence, including food. So that it comes to this with Mill, that whether a country is turned into a desert by the destruction of its capital in war, or by fire and flood, or what not, or is made so fertile by inventions and better processes that things become as cheap as if they fell like manna from heaven, will make no difference to profits! Now this gives us a glimpse into the reasons that have caused Mill to entangle himself in these stultifications and contradictions.