And the consequence is, as we should expect, that Capitalism having now got a comparatively firm and level highway, and not a mere quagmire, beneath its feet, is everywhere running rampant with inequality; - as indeed is exemplified economically in the industrial undertaking's which are now being; combined and consolidated into mammoth Trusts, as well as in the huge inequalities of private fortunes on the higher levels of income.

And here again we may say that it will only be when these inequalities in turn are coerced by national or international pressure (whether taking the form of legislation which shall lop off 'unearned increments' of every kind, or of a new industrial organization which will have the same effect), that in the grading of men, inequalities in the manner in which they employ their wealth, or in the culture, taste, and refinement exhibited in its mode of expenditure, will make themselves the primary considerations in the world's esteem; and that not only modest incomes with 'plain living and high thinking,' but honest poverty itself, will cease to be shunned and concealed as if it were a leprosy or crime. But in the meantime we may venture to predict, that the play of these leviathan inequalities of fortune which have only recently begun, will before their noontide and consummation, breed a class of men whose moral standards and ideals will if unchecked sink the race as low as ever did the imperial throne of the Caesars - with its Neros, Caligulas, and Caracallas, - all ranks alike of the Roman people.

And this it will do through the low ideals of the great masses of men, whose poverty breeds the base admirations which colossal wealth and ostentation draw out, as the sun does the miasms of the marsh; fascinating their secret idolatries, and hypnotizing them as the eyes of malignant serpents do birds, and so reproducing their base ideals faster than either preaching or prophesying, religion or the hope of heaven, can outroot them. Even now the streets of the world are lined with crowds who drink in every movement of these overblown financial potentates, as if they were emperors or kings. But to return.

We have seen, then, that in the present stage of the evolution of Industry, the distribution of Rents, Profits, and Wages, would all alike tend, if left to themselves, to inequality; even the simplest bargain between individuals never being quite on level terms, but depending always on the relative strength of the desires with which the one party to a transaction wishes to part with an article or piece of property, and the other wishes to acquire it. So that although in the Pure Science of Political Economy there is, as we have seen, only one law of distribution, namely that all the factors alike, whether Rent, Profits, Interest, or Wages, tend to rise and fall together according to the speed of the revolutions of the wheel; in the Applied Science with which we are dealing, - and which has to function in a world of separate nationalities with their respective political constitutions, policies, legislative enactments, etc., - the distribution of wealth depends for its variations from the normal, entirely on the incidence of Power in the widest sense of that term; whether it be the power of the sword, of legislation, of custom, of the pressure of public opinion, or of those purely economic advantages of time, place, situation, and position which are not transferable, and cannot be annulled.

This is the real world in which the wheel of wealth revolves and functions, and by which all its natural revolutions are accelerated or impeded at each and every point; and it is in this world that our doctrine holds true, that the distribution of all economic things tends to inequality, - and not, as the orthodox economists hold (except in the case of Kent), to equality. And the conclusion of it all for economic reformers and statesmen is, that as the distribution of wealth is a composite of two factors; - namely of Power on the one hand, which, as being always centred in the hands of human beings, tends ever to the conservation, aggrandizement, and augmentation of itself, and so to make cumulatively for inequality; and of the pure abstract laws of the wheel on the other, which if not interfered with by the intrusion of Power from without or from within, would tend everywhere to make the economic prosperity or adversity of all the classes engaged rise or fall together; - it follows, that to handle any tangled economic situation with a view to the general welfare, we must keep our eye fixed on where the incidence of Power falls, rather than on the pure laws of the wheel itself.

For it is the intrusions of Power that are usually the cause of any obstructions that may arise in its running; and just as in the complications of home life, cynical observers have suggested that it is always advisable to 'cherchez-la-femme,' so in all economic situations of difficulty, it is always necessary to ask, where is the man, or class of men, or institution, or law, or policy, or what not, which has succeeded in entrenching itself so firmly in its position that if left unmolested it will continue to dominate the situation indefinitely, and so keep up the economic grievances which it is the interest of the public to remove; - and there to direct its batteries. In other words, it is to Politics and Legislation that we must look primarily for the remedying of economic grievances, and not to 'laissez-faire' and the abstract laws of the wheel itself when running in vacuo as it were, and cut off from its roots in the real world.

And now we have come to the end of our survey of the orthodox Political Economy from Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill. At one point or another of our discussion we have managed, I think, to introduce practically all of the main doctrines of the orthodox system which are included in this stage of its development, and have endeavoured to give to each as much space and consideration as its importance would seem to demand. In the immediately succeeding chapters, I propose to concentrate attention on those modifications of the doctrine of the orthodox school of Ricardo and Mill which have been made by the later writers who have carried on its traditions to the present time, as well as on the doctrines of those outside economic thinkers who while still clinging to many of the doctrines of the orthodox school, have made the most effective breaches in its walls at one and another point, and so have prepared the way for the new Copernican system which, borrowing an analogy from Astronomy, I am here making a first rough attempt to erect on the ruins of the old Ptolemaic one.