So, too, Population has contradictory effects according to circumstances. When each labourer or wage-earner is dispersed and isolated, concentrated Capital can sweat them all alike down to a 'bare subsistence' wage, as easily as if they were slaves or cattle, and, indeed will always do so unless the pressure of a strong public opinion forbids it. On the other hand, when this vast miscellaneous population of wage-earners instead of remaining isolated begins to organize and roll itself up into Trades Unions, and when these, in turn, shall have consolidated themselves into one gigantic all-embracing world-trades-union, then you will have the spectacle of Capital as gradually but surely squeezed of its profits as Labour was before of its wages, until nothing is left it but bare interest; and in the end, if the world-population of wage-earners have tenacity enough to stick together as one man, nothing would be left for the capitalists but to take to the highway, as the wage earners had to do before them, and to merge themselves in the ranks of the ordinary working-men. And accordingly we find Mill contending that if the working men will, when population increases, only insist on maintaining their accustomed standard of living, the capitalists will have to make good the increased wage bill out of their profits; if, on the other hand, the excess of population causes the working men to struggle like demons to obtain work at any wage, then, says Mill, the capitalists will keep their profits, and leave wages to suffer; and so on.

Now as the object of the Political Economy of Mill and the orthodox Economists generally in an industrial age is mainly to discover the fixed and stable laws which define the relations between Capital and Labour, how can they even hope to succeed when they make them depend and rest on Rent on the one hand, and Population on the other, each of which will lead to precisely opposite results according to the way in which it is handled? From all of which it is evident, is it not, that Mill's laws of the distribution of wealth, with profits rising and wages falling when population behaves in one way, and the opposite when it behaves in another; with Rent squeezing Capital under one set of conditions, and Capital squeezing Rent under a different set; and with Population squeezing or being squeezed by both according to circumstances; must be as inconstant, unstable, and, in effect, practically false as his contradictory laws of Production.

The last of Mill's great cardinal fallacies is his splitting up 'Freedom of Contract' into two, and throwing one half of it away, as we have already seen him do when he threw away Consumption, under the belief that it was an unnecessary factor in a Science of Political Economy. Now as 'freedom of contract' is everywhere and always the ultimate postulate and presupposition which Mill and all his successors of the academic and orthodox schools insist on the reader accepting before they ask him to follow them through the course of their demonstrations, it is evident that if we find them playing fast and loose here, all the dependent propositions which hang on this postulate may be discarded without further remark. And yet this is precisely what they all have done, and still are doing. For freedom of contract, it is to be observed, always carries with it a freedom to combine as well as a freedom to compete, inasmuch as the economic commodities which are the subject-matter of the contract are not mere dead drift-wood floating helplessly hither and thither as on a tide, but arc always a personal property in the hands of living men, - as much so, indeed, as their hands or feet, - and when once acquired will be held as tenaciously.

Instead of being allowed to drift idly away, they can on the contrary, when parted with or sold, be either put up to competition in an open market by their owner, or merged in combination with the property of other owners, according to which course is likely to bring the largest returns. And hence if we find, as is indubitably the case, that the whole course of industry is daily tending more and more in all advanced countries to the formation of combinations of individual capitals, and not to the competition of these capitals; that it is tending as well to the combination of the wage earners in Trades Unions, instead of their competition with each other for work; and if we note further that as all combinations which extinguish competition become monopolies, and monopolies, in turn, give rise to profits, wages, or rents, respectively, which like Government taxes, have elements of force, power, or caprice about them which cannot be reduced to economic law, and have nothing therefore to do with the pure science of Political Economy; - if we find all this, and further, if we can show that the tendency of profits and wages in different occupations, whether agricultural, manufacturing, commercial, or what not, is not to equality, as the orthodox Economy contends, but on the contrary to inequality, we shall see reversed the most important of all the practical conclusions of the science; - and all because the orthodox economists have persisted in ignoring one half of what is implicitly involved in their own premise of the freedom of contract, by retaining the effects of competition, but throwing away those of combination, I propose then to show on purely independent grounds that if we resolve freedom of contract into its necessary implication, as including combination as well as competition, we shall find the tendency of all economic things, Wages and Profits included, like that of all things else in this world operated by men (and not the subjects merely of purely physical laws) is towards Inequality, and not as the orthodox Economists contend, towards Equality. If I shall succeed in doing this to the reader's satisfaction, I shall at last have demonstrated what I announced at the beginning, namely that the orthodox Political Economy is everywhere made up of theoretical half-truths, and therefore that its practical conclusions are not only false here and there, but false altogether; and that the reason of this is that it has everywhere split up its premises into two halves, and thrown one half away as useless; - has split up the wheel of wealth into Production and Consumption and thrown consumption out; in Free Trade, has split up the population into producers and consumers, and catered for the consumers alone, throwing the producers overboard to shift for themselves; has split up 'freedom of contract' into competition alone, and left out combination altogether; and further, that when it has done this, it has replaced the all-essential halves which it has-thrown away as useless, by bringing in foreign elements of purely capricious Power or Force, - such as politics, legislation, custom, etc., - which have nothing to do with the Pure Science of Political Economy; and finally, that where it ought to have brought in these foreign elements proper to the science of Civilization as a whole, - namely, in its Applied Science, - it has left them out altogether, and so has rendered all its practical conclusions false and unworkable.

But as the proof of the tendency of all things economic to Inequality rather than to Equality, is so important and ultimate for a true science of Political Economy, I propose to devote a special chapter to it; and hope to be able to bring forward numbers of smaller fallacies common to Mill and his orthodox successors, which I have not had an opportunity of touching on heretofore, for the reader's consideration.