IN continuing our examination of the evolution of Political Economy from Mill to the present day, the task before us will, after our foregoing discussions, be a comparatively simple one. With Mill, Political Economy became at once orthodox and academic; and the impress then given it, so far as its organic skeleton and the concatenation of its leading principles are concerned, has remained to the present day. Practically, therefore, most of the criticisms we have applied to the developed Economy of Mill, will apply equally well to all his orthodox successors, and need no longer detain us. But the object of this volume would be but imperfectly attained if the matter were left here. It is incumbent on me to show as well that, as 1 said in my opening chapter, Political Economy is no exception to the doctrine that if once any department of human activity is cut from its roots in History and Civilization, for the purpose of making an academic specialism of it, the further its evolution and development have proceeded from its original basis and its delimited stock of first principles, the more unreal and fantastic do its specialized doctrines become, until they end too frequently in sand-heaps of pedantry and absurdity.

Scientific laws are replaced by detailed inventories of short-sighted methods and processes, constructive combinations by ultra-microscopic analyses, until all focus and perspective is lost; and of this tendency, the evolution of academic Political Economy since Mill, affords one of the most striking exemplifications. But as my space is restricted, and there are limits to the reader's endurance of prolonged discussions on human pedantry, I propose to plunge at once in mediae res by concentrating attention on a few of the leading representatives of the different schools - Jevons, Marshall, Bohm-Bawerk, Walker. Clark, and others, - and on the three problems which have most exercised the minds of the orthodox economists since Mill, namely the problems of Value, of Interest, and of Distribution; leaving what I have to say of the 'outside economists' - the men like Ruskin, Marx, Henry George, Gunton, Hobson, and others - to a later chapter.

But if my criticisms of this rather intricate set of problems are to have coherence and continuity, it is necessary that I should prepare the reader beforehand, by a tabulation of the errors of method which he may expect to find in the speculations of these later economists; and as these errors all hang together in a chain, each following on what went before, it will be better to exhibit them in their connection, before starting on the main business of this chapter.

In the first place, then, like the earlier economists, they have missed the part played by Consumption as an integral factor in their Science, and as a consequence have missed the fact that the mechanism with which they are dealing is a double-sided revolving and self-regulating wheel of Production and Consumption, as the mechanism of the eye is a self-regulating globe of sight. In missing the wheel, they have missed its central axle, - which, as we shall see, plays so important a part in the problem of Value and of Interest, - and therefore the focussing point from which all its movements can be surveyed in a single view. In missing this central point of survey on the axle, again, and the men of the central exchanges who sit on it, - the dealers of the Money, the Corn, the Metal, and other Exchanges, who are in touch with every side and aspect of the wheel - they have missed the fact that these men really control the amount of supply of any commodity that shall be forthcoming to keep pace with the demand - the amount of new land taken into cultivation, or of old land allowed to fall out of it, of new mills to be erected, or of old ones to be closed, etc., - and so are the initiators of economic phenomena, and not merely the passive registrars of them, and help to regulate and steady the pace of the wheel, while themselves guided by that pace.

And the consequence, again, of these academic economists not seeing things all round from this commanding point of view in the centre, and in the open sunlight, as it were, is, that they have had no other alternative but to conduct their investigations of the laws of the wheel from a distracted multiplicity of independent transactions on one or other side of it, where only half the significance of each is visible; and in consequence have missed the element of economic Power which results from concealed but virtual monopolies, and which, as we shall see, is to be found gathered up and concentrated in bulk, only in the hands of the men on the axle - the power of landlord over tenant, of capitalist over workman, of the money-lender over the money-borrower, - all of which, like loaded dice, give their possessors an advantage in every, the smallest, individual transaction or bargain. For although negotiated under the form of 'freedom of contract,' these bargains involve, as we have seen, the freedom to combine as well as to compete; the competition being only a halfway-house, as it were, - as the industrial world has lately given proof, - on the road to combination.

And having missed this intrusion of economic Power, under the illusion that all contracts are free, and that competition reigns everywhere, they have missed the fact that all economic forces alike tend not to Equality, but, as we saw in the last chapter, to Inequality.

Now the above errors of method, and neglects, are the common heritage of the Orthodox Political Economy both before and since the time of Mill; but in the discussion on Value, Interest, and the Distribution of Wealth, with which the academic Economists since Mill have been mainly concerned, and to which I am now to invite the reader's consideration, there are three special illusions into which they have fallen, and which it is necessary we should keep in mind. These all spring from their inability to focus their subject-matter properly, owing to their not seeing that they were dealing with a revolving wheel which has a central axle, and, in consequence, to their having lost their way in groping about among their own subtleties. These three illusions are: -