But General Walker, believing with all the orthodox economists that profits tend to equality - instead of rolling themselves up like snowballs as the capital increases, - figures each particular coup as a masterstroke of genius, and their authors as little Napoleons. Had he read, as I have recently done, the inner history of the Standard Oil Company, he would have perceived to what a set of poor tricksters inflated into greatness by his own imagination, he had given not merely the nominal, but the real primacy of the industrial world.

And with this we may now proceed to the main burden of this chapter, which is to show that if there were nothing more to find fault with, the method itself by which these later academic economists propose to solve the problems that come before them, would condemn their whole labours to falsity and sterility. For what they propose to do is nothing less than this; - namely to shear off at a stroke all the dynamical elements in the problems of a science which is itself purely dynamical, and when they have in this way taken the life out of them, to reduce them to their purely statical elements, as in a body after it is dead; the excluded dynamical elements being afterwards allowed for under the innocent looking phrase 'other things being equal.' Now this is to kill your subject first, and add the life afterwards - a hopeless procedure! It is a fallacy we have already had occasion to notice in our study of Mill, but it reaches its full flowering in his successors, of whom we may take as examples, Walker, Marshall, and Professor Clark.

To begin with Walker. He is dealing with the problem of Value, and in order to show that it follows the cost of production of that part of the supply which is produced under the greatest difficulties and disadvantages, the following are the emasculating conditions to which he subjects the facts before he starts out; - first, that competition must be perfect: next that there is no large stock on hand, but that things are produced as they are wanted; next, again, that there is a uniform demand; then, that there is no large plant, and no great amount of capital or machinery required; and lastly, that the producers have an easy resort to other occupations. Now without dwelling on the obvious fact that he has illegitimately inserted among these provisos which bear on cost of production, one which bears on consumption, namely that there shall be a uniform demand - a condition which proves that Value does not depend on cost of production after all, as he contends, but, as we have seen, on the relation between cost, and the amount of consumption; - but ignoring this for the moment, is it not evident that these conditions which he imposes on his problem at the outset, reduce it as much to a nullity as if he had proposed to forecast the issue of a foot-race by insisting that the strength and height and agility of all the runners should be equal, and that they should all equally 'toe the line' before setting out; in which case the runners, it is evident, would all end as they began; or as if he were to say that life was the result of the vital principle, that the tree was the cause of the fruit, that two and two are four, and that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to one another, - barren propositions all.

For is it not evident that the conditions imposed by Walker can only exist in the very childhood of production, - at that stage of homogeneity, namely, where evolution begins, but from which it is taking it farther and farther every day, - or else in the millennial kingdom itself? Instead of competition being free and equal, it is already being replaced in all the great industries by combination, as we see in the great Trusts; instead of small stocks continually replenished in driblets, huge stocks kept always on hand are the order of the day; instead of no large plant, no great amount of machinery or capital, the future of industry is by universal admission in the hands of the gigantic capitals and plants concentrated in special centres, and enabled by the present facilities of transport and communication not only to hold their own customers but to swoop down on the customers of all lesser concerns as well, and carry them off as spoils; and lastly, instead of the labourers having an easy resort to other occupations than their own, the fact is that with the existing specialisation of work in all industries, it is the most difficult of all things, unless one is a dock labourer, a hod-carrier, or a scavenger.

And yet it is all these that Walker proposes to cut out of the problems of Political Economy before he begins his deductions; - as disturbing elements merely, which can afterwards be allowed for, and not as belonging to the very essence of the problem.

And next, let us turn to Professor Marshall, and see what are the conditions for which he stipulates before he can show that the value of two commodities is proportionate to the relative amounts of labour and capital expended in producing them. They are, firstly, that the labour is equally skilled, secondly, that it is assisted by proportionate amounts of capital, thirdly, that the period of investment of the capital is the same, and fourthly, that the rates of profit are equal. It will be observed, in passing, that in this inventory he has avoided the illogical error of Walker in admitting an equality of demand as one of his conditions, for neither he nor Walker allow that the consumption which is involved in demand is a necessary factor and postulate of the Science at all. It is true, as we have already seen, that in his comments on Jevons he sees that Value depends on demand, - that is to say, consumption, - as well as on cost of production, as is evident by his analogy of the pair of scissors each blade of which is necessary to the other: but unfortunately, as he has ruled out Consumption as a definite factor in his scheme of the Science, his consumption-blade could only have had a very negative function after all, for there was nothing that he could consistently and logically give it to do.