But even if we admit that the products of industry, - say, wheat, copper, coal, etc., - tend to equality in the large central markets and exchanges, it is evident that the separate instruments of production themselves, - the land, the mines, the favoured situations, etc., - must be as unequal in the profits they yield as are the fertility and yield of the separate pieces of soil, the separate mines, and the different situations from which they proceed. So that although speculation in the products of industry may temporarily lead one man to fortune and another to poverty, while leaving the great mass of operations as a whole on the same level as before, (as gambling on even chances does the great bulk of the players), the possession of the instruments of production from which profits proceed, form 'permanent inequalities as great as are the relative strengths of these instruments; and even when the rival possessors of these kill each other out by competition, the inequality is only deepened, not equalized; and when some of these combine instead of competing, and succeed in extinguishing the others altogether (as the great Trusts in America have done), the result can with no more justification be regarded as a tendency of profits to equality, than the reduction of a nation to a desert can be regarded as a tendency to peace, or than the reduction of the nobility of France by Louis XIV. to a common level of dependence on himself, was a tendency to equality.

And the upshot of it all is, that although the dead products of industry, which are delivered over to pure competition, will tend like all dead things to equality, inasmuch as having been already plucked from their stems or set free from their workshops, they have no longer any roots anywhere, but will move hither and thither according as chance, or the incidence of market prices determines; the fixed capital, or instruments of production themselves, on the other hand, from which they proceed, - like trees and animals which have their roots in definite soils and environments, - not being transferable, cannot be so shifted; and their permanent yields in consequence (or in other words their profits) must, until they are extinguished altogether by competition, tend to inequality. The orthodox economists accordingly, in making Capital the result of a mere negation - Saving - while at the same time making it function as the great controlling power on which both Rent and Wages have to wait cap-in-hand until it is served, have not only stultified the very first principles of their Science, but have helped to entrench themselves the more strongly in one of their greatest illusions, - the tendency of Profits to an equality.

Had they, on the contrary, made Capital the outcome of the active powers of Nature embodied in their machines and inventions, - as the Physiocrats and Adam Smith made Rent the outcome of the powers of Nature embodied in the soil, - they not only would have been consistent and logical in giving Capital the primacy in their system instead of Rent, but would have escaped this special illusion of the tendency of Profits to an equality as well. But having already got their feet in the bog through their abstract doctrines, they sank still further, and were the more confirmed in their illusions, when in the time of Mill they looked around them and saw that nearly all capitals engaged in industry, were engaged in such break-neck competition with each other, that their profits were not only being reduced to an equality in the struggle, but were being quickly reduced to a minimum as well. But while Mill was persuading himself that the tendency to equality was the normal tendency of profits, and, - believing as he did that it was an eternal law of Political Economy, - was becoming nervously apprehensive lest the tendency of profits to a minimum also, was likely to be realized, events themselves were on the point of giving the lie to all his fears, predictions, and principles.

For when capitalists found that the profits of different industries in the same line of work, depending as they must do on unequal powers in the instruments of production employed, were really unequal on every pound of capital invested, it was not long before a few of the larger firms in each industry took to combining instead of competing, and by the immense saving in costs which production on a large scale made possible, began gradually to drive their weaker rivals from the field. In the very year of Mill's death, the great American Oil combination had already got itself firmly entrenched, - with results to the rest of the American oil refiners which all the world now sees; and yet in all its operations, the American Oil Trust has infringed none of the original presuppositions of the orthodox school - neither its principle of freedom of contract, which involves in its essence freedom to combine as well as to compete, nor yet its principle of laissez-faire. But so great, indeed, has been the inequality of profits which has resulted, that the most serious problem of the present time is, how these portentous inequalities resulting from the freedom of contract and laissez-faire are to be controlled.

And when we remember that these profits are in the hands of men, - and not of dead machines, or of an abstraction like mankind in general: - and further that these men intend to aggrandise themselves and to promote their own interests by means of them (for that is part of the game of wealth which all who go into business are playing), and far from manuring the general world with them, outside the range of their private charities, will grip them all the more tenaciously to themselves, while leaving the public only the scraps and entrails, as the lions do the jackals; - what then are we to say to a Political Economy which lets loose on the world for its consolation, the doctrine that if you leave things alone and give them a little time to readjust themselves, all these gigantic profits will, through the entrance into the arena of new competitors, tend to equality again?