But our single file illustration will have sufficed to show that savings can only come out of products after they are sold or consumed; in other words, only out of a continuous wheel of production and consumption, and not out of a rod or stick of mere production alone. And this brings us flush on a paradox which the Orthodox Economists have shirked through not daring to grasp their nettle firmly enough - the paradox namely that products must die and be destroyed economically before anything can be saved out of them, like that old paradox of the seed of corn which if it abideth alone has no increase, but if it fall into the earth and die, bringeth forth much fruit. Now I admit that at first sight it seems strange that a product must first die and be extinguished before savings can come out of it, and I am not surprised that the Orthodox Economist-should strain at it, but first or last they will be obliged to swallow it, and to so enlarge their economic categories as to embrace it, if the laws and principles of their Science are ever to correspond with reality.

For in what, we ask, do the savings which play so important a role in the orthodox Economy consists They are not part of the products themselves, for these, I repeat, will not keep; they-must come, therefore, out of something that will retain, its economic value unimpaired into the future. What, then, is this something? It can only be that thing, however imperfect, which all nations have agreed to accept and honour as their standard in all business transactions, namely gold and silver, or their equivalents in credit obligations which are upheld by all the force of law and public opinion, and which are always and at any moment translatable into gold or silver, more or less discounted of course according to the strength of governments to enforce them if they are transactions between individuals, or the good faith of these governments in meeting and redeeming them if they are between nations. As nothing, then, but gold or its credit equivalents can be saved and, other things being equal, be transmitted unimpaired into the unknown future (with one exception which we shall see presently) the Orthodox Economists, even when their logic was running away with them in an opposite direction, ought, I venture to say, to have seen what is a commonplace with every business man, namely that all economic products as such must be convertible into gold or its equivalents, in other words, must be sold and consumed, before savings,can accrue.

And so we come around again to our starting point, that it is only from a continuously revolving wheel of production and consumption that saving, as an economic idea or fact, is possible, and not from a rod of mere products alone. 1 am of course aware of the difficulties raised by the orthodox Economists against accepting gold or silver as the final standard of value in business transactions, on the ground that these, too, vary in their value relatively to other things from time to time, according to the amount of the precious metals thrown on the market by the discovery of new mines, or from other causes. But this, in my judgment, is a mere pedantry. They might as well object to Homer or Shakespeare being the standards and touchstones by which to estimate the grades of literary excellence, because the one sometimes nods and the other is not always up to his highwater mark; or object to the legs as the organs of human locomotion because they vary in their efficiency according to the state of the other organs of the body.

The truth is that gold is the best standard at present available, and as the world of men have agreed to accept it as ultimate, and to take chances, in their bargains, of its possible future fluctuations of value, the fact of these fluctuations no more impairs the truth of our principle, that all savings whatever must come out of it and be convertible into terms of it, than if its value always remained as fixed and steadfast as the pole. And if savings can be only made in it or its convertible equivalents, it follows that they come not out of production alone,, which is only half the process, but out of production and sale, in other words, out of the double-sided wheel of production and consumption.