He says definitively that 'to popular apprehension it seems that demand, customers, a market for the commodity, are the cause of the gain of capitalists.' But he hastens to add that this is an error and that, on the contrary, then use of profit is that labour produces more then is required for its support.' In other words, to revert to our original symbol, the cause of the increase of wealth, according to Mill, is to be found in the fact that of a given rod or stick of wealth already in existence a less relative amount has to be cut off to feed the wage-earners and labourers than before, whether your unit of time be a week, a month, or a year; and so, a larger quantity of available wealth can be carried forward and added to the produce of the succeeding week, month or year. But the truth is that far from labour producing more than is required for its support, Man, of all animals, without the aid of those powers of Nature which he commands through his invention and tool-using capacity - as of slings, bows and arrows, fish-hooks, boats, weapons of defence, and so on - would be the quickest to starve and be devoured.

So far then from the increase of wealth being due to the fact that 'labour produces more than is required for its support,' it is due on the contrary to the fact that Man, when stimulated by the pressure put on him by his desire for consumption, can by appropriate inventions call to his aid the powers of Nature as a free gift. Now seeing that in actual fact it is owing to these free gifts of the powers of Nature that labour, as Mill says, produces more than is required for its support, it may seem captious and hypercritical to dwell on this difference; and so indeed it would, if we looked merely at the actual result; in the same way as it is immaterial whether we regard ten as the result of fifteen minus five or of five plus five. But it makes all the difference in the logical deductions that are to be drawn from these respective symbols. It makes all the difference whether the increase of wealth is due to a continuous positive addition of production and consumption, growing like a snowball as it rolls, and throwing off like a new machine double the quantity of product of an old one in a given time; or whether it is due to a negative addition of production minus consumption, from which as from a miser's hoard the more that can be saved in one year the more will be added to the wealth of the next.

It is the difference between putting your talents out to use for a continuous increase, and putting them in a napkin and trying by saving to make them last as long as possible. In the one 'case the laws of Political Economy will be deduced from the dynamics of a wheel of production and consumption, where the amount of wealth thrown off by it will depend on the number of its revolutions in a given time; in the other case these laws will be deduced from the statics of a stick which adds to its length each year by the amount it can save from the preceding year, but where the fatal element is involved that the additions become less and less as time goes on, inasmuch as the more that is saved one year, the less will be required to be produced the next, and so, too, in the next and next; while if it is still produced but not consumed, it will moulder and decay and be relegated to the dustbin of wasted human effort. And the result of it all will be, that your rod of wealth which was going to be like the tree which the child saw no reason should not go on growing and growing till it went out of sight into the sky, or like the conjuror's rod which divides and divides until the pieces laid end to end seem to stretch out to infinity, will on the contrary be found to be like those roads in Western America described by Emerson, which opening out in wide expanses and magnificent unending vistas were discovered when tracked far enough to 'end in a squirrel track and to run up a tree!' Now, that I am not misrepresenting Mill, whom I have taken as the typical Orthodox Economist for my purpose here, may be seen from definite pronouncements of his in other passages, as where, for example, he says that 'it is not the mere opening of a market for a country's production that tends to raise the rate of profits; or again, that even where this opening of markets 'makes room for more capital at the same profit, it is by enabling the necessaries of life or the habitual articles of the labourers' consumption to be obtained at a smaller cost.' Here then you have the difference between us in a nutshell.

Mill's conception is evidently that of a rod or stick of wealth, whose increase will depend on as little as possible being cut off its end for consumption at each remove; and not on the movements of a continuously running wheel, where the increase will depend on the number of its revolutions in a given time; that is to say, on the amount of saving in proportion to the possibilities of production, not on the amount of consumption in proportion to the possibilities of production - a toto coelo difference in the very fundamentals from which all the laws and principles of Political Economy are to be deduced; and in reference to which I will only say in passing, that should the Orthodox Economy prove to be the true system after all, it will be the only instance in recorded thought of a true Science being able to sustain itself on a negation as a foundation.