Indeed the reason that England was able to whip up her productive capacity to the point necessary to keep pace with this world-wide demand for consumption, was that she had practically a monopoly of all the materials necessary to the production of the commodities which the other nations so much desired - the coal and iron, the machinery, etc., as well as the transport and shipping - in all of which the economic powers of Nature were imprisoned and packed in quantities enormous in proportion to the labour expended on liberating them and calling them forth. The industrial output of the other nations, on the contrary, consisted mainly of purely natural productions which owing to their abundance and the absence of transport were to be had almost for the asking, when exchanged with English manufactured goods. And accordingly, just as the spices of the East in the Middle Ages, which were so abundant and cheap in their own homes, were yet so highly prized and so valuable in Europe that they made the fortunes of Venice, Genoa, Florence, and the other Italian Republics who traded in them, so it was in the case of the English traders, who holding as they did a virtual monopoly of the manufactured goods which the foreign nations both of Europe and the East most desired, were, like men with loaded dice in their hands, able to get the advantage of the foreigners in every transaction; getting in fact the labour of scores or hundreds of foreign labourers and Orientals for one of their own: so that precious cargoes of ivory, furs, spices, sugar, wine, dried fruits, tobacco, and what not, could be had in many places for a few trinkets, rags of calico, or strings of glass beads.

And the consequence was that the wealth of England rolled itself up like a snowball, her wheel of wealth not only enlarging its circumference, but increasing the speed of its revolutions in a given time. And a further consequence was that as the monopoly of English products was in the hands of a comparatively few rich manufacturers, merchants, and shippers, while the foreign producers were for the most part a miscellaneous swarm of poverty-stricken hand-to-mouth workmen and agriculturists, the wealth of England could go on piling itself up, while they barely did more than mark time. And the reason of this, again, was that while the handful of English monopolists with their profits accruing in great lump sums, could turn them into more and ever more fixed capital and productive works at home or productive loans abroad, and so could add immensely to the economic powers of Nature they held in their hands from which wealth and profits were to be drawn; the swarms of foreign consumers on the other hand, - isolated, dispersed, and incapable of combination or organization, - were restricted in their productive capacity to scratching the soil with wooden ploughs, hunting elephants for their ivory, or wild animals for their furs, or planting their little fields with vines, tobacco, or sugar cane; and so were disposed to turn the advantage they derived from the exchange into the mere unproductive consumption of trinkets or ornaments for their persons; - or if they managed to save anything out of it in gold or silver, it would only be to hide it away against the evil day of dearth or extortion, or lend it to their Governments to be shot away in war.

For although, as the orthodox Economists are so fond of asserting, the personal benefits of every exchange are mutual, else they would not take place, they are not, it is to be observed, equally profitable to both side, or conducive to an equal increase of wealth - as anyone having dealings with a moneylender can testify! Indeed, as we shall see later, the mere concentration of a given amount of capital in a single hand gives it an advantage in every exchange over an equal amount of capital dispersed among many hands, as a cannon ball has more efficiency than any number of dispersed rifle bullets of the same aggregate weight. And hence it was that England grew richer and richer as a nation in her trade relations with other nations, in spite of the fact that the great masses of her own people were so poor that they could not of themselves have taken off her hands more than a fraction of what she produced. And so our symbol of the Wheel with its necessary corollary, - namely that in its continuous running the productive side cannot outrun the consumption side, - is justified; only in this case of England, the consumption was kept up more by other nations than by her own.

It was the same with Ancient Rome, where the nobles and knights grew richer and richer, both from their usurious banking and from their gradual acquisition of more and more of the mines, the vineyards, and the corn-fields of the conquered countries, even although the great masses of the Roman citizens them-selves were so poor, that in spite of the free distribution of corn, they consumed little more per head than the gangs of slaves and freedmen who worked these mines, vineyards and cornfields for their masters. The explanation is that consumption was mainly done by the rest of the world who were not Roman citizens, but whose private property was legally protected although they themselves were politically enslaved.

But an even more pregnant instance was that of the Southern States of America before the Civil War. For there you had an entire section of a country which had grown rich on the basis of a slave population whose only consumption was of as much cheap cotton as would cover their backs, and as much maize and molasses as would keep them in health - a land which had it continued self-enclosed and out of trade relations with the rest of the world, would have remained little more industrially advanced to-day than it was when the Red Indian roamed over it. For if all the production that was necessary was such as was sufficient to supply the slaves and the 'mean whites' of which the population was composed, where was the increase of wealth to come from? Great fields of cotton. tobacco, sugar, and rice, would not have been made to arise out of the swamps and the wilderness for them; and as for the planters themselves, a few cultivated fields here and there would have more than supplied all that they and their families could consume: while a few scattered villas of imposing appearance and adorned with articles of ostentation or luxury would have as easily sufficed to keep up their authority and social prestige among their white and black dependents, as a few extra feathers, skins, or layers of war paint did those of the Indian chiefs.