In all these cases, at whatever point the mischief may happen to arise, it is quickly propagated all around the wheel until it involves every class in the community. It is the same when the general wealth is being increased. It may take its rise on the side of Production; as, for example, by new inventions, as the introduction of steam power and electricity; or by new chemical processes of far reaching commercial value; by the influx of capital into new countries for the opening up of railways, canals, mines, fertile lands, or works of irrigation; by the discovery of new gold mines; or by the better administration of justice and the enforcing of severe laws against commercial dishonesty, etc. Or, again, the increase of wealth may take its rise on the side of Consumption; in the high rate of wages, for example, of the great masses of the population (provided always they are not out of proportion to the skill of the workers and the powers of fixed capital to keep pace with them); or of better harvests among small peasant proprietors; or of cheaper food supplies owing to greater transport facilities at home, or free importations from abroad, and the like; the only difference in the propagation of wealth through all classes at a time when wealth is increasing and when it is diminishing, being as we saw in a former chapter, that whereas when it is diminishing, it matters not whether the immediate cause is located on the production or consumption side of the wheel; when it is increasing, on the contrary, if the immediate cause lies in some fresh impetus having been given to the productive side, it will have no effect, or only a temporary one, unless provision is made for the increased production being carried off by a corresponding consumption, - if not at home, then abroad.

For Consumption, as we have seen, is the controlling factor, the brake on the wheel of wealth, inasmuch as wealth if produced will not continue to be reproduced unless there is a corresponding increase in the wages or incomes by which alone it can be consumed.

Now the above instances and examples are the veriest commonplaces of the industrial world and of business men everywhere, but as no symbol has been found by which to unify them, they have remained merely as isolated experiences without any law or principle to bind them together and give them a scientific unity and harmony. And although I venture to think that our symbol of the wheel does this for the business world, I am aware that for the students of Political Economy this inner unity and harmony is apt to be obscured by the false importation into the subject of material which properly belongs to the domain of Politics, and which we must carefully separate out if we are to avoid the appearance of contradiction to existing facts which this intrusion of foreign matter lends to our doctrine. Indeed all this extraneous material must be ruthlessly weeded out if we are ever to get either a Pure or an Applied Science of Political Economy as a sub-department of the wider Science of Civilization or Sociology. In later chapters I shall discuss these aspects of our subject in detail in my criticism of the authors with whose names they are more closely identified, but for the present I shall restrict myself to meeting a few general objections with the object of giving the reader some indication of the sort of thing I have in my mind.

Now, the first objection that would naturally occur to our doctrine that when wealth is being increased all classes alike tend to benefit by it economically, and when it is declining all alike tend to be the poorer, is one bearing on slavery and serfdom. For how, it will be asked, can it be true that the wealth of all classes of the population rises or falls together, when the slave or serf neither received more food, clothing, nor produce, when his master was increasing his wealth nor lees when he was losing it? This question, it must be obvious I think, on reflection, does not strictly belong to the Science of Political Economy at all. It is for kings and statesmen to answer the question, why, by brute force or legislation they thus drove a wedge into the economic wheel at those stages of civilization in which slavery and serfdom prevailed? Political Economy as such can take account only of the effects of these outside obstructions on the movements of its wheel; it has nothing whatever to do with the obstructions themselves as causes, any more indeed than the law of gravitation has to do with a house which so securely supports a stone on its roof that it refuses to let it fall to the ground.

But how about the workman of the present day, it will be asked, who fulfils all the conditions of economic freedom in his bargain with his employer for wages? Why do his wages not keep time and step with the profits of his employer, rising as they rise and falling as they fall? Or why, again, do they bear a different proportion to the earnings of the employers in one country and another? The answer is still the same; it is due to the intrusion of extraneous influences which have nothing to do with the Science of Political Economy - whether they be political, legislative, or psychological influences, as, for example, the laws against combinations of workmen; or because wages move along the sluggish lines of evolution and custom which dominate the minds of both workmen and employers alike, and cause the movements of the wheel on one side to be wanting in ease and fluidity compared with those on the other. The remedy lies only in counter legislation, or in the workmen themselves laying to heart that golden sentence of Emerson, that it is 'the imbecility of the masses that invites the impudence of power.'