BUT there is one essential difference between the laws of movement of a running wheel and the laws involved in the production and reproduction of wealth, and before we can satisfy ourselves that this symbol of a wheel can be transferred in its entirety to the wheel of wealth, we must investigate the meaning and implications of this point of difference. It consists, in a word, in this, that whereas the wheel of wealth is alive, as it were, and self-moving, animated and kept a-going, as it is, by living human beings, a mechanical wheel on the contrary, gets its motion from outside itself. Not that this will make any difference to the pure Science, or to the laws of the respective wheels as such, just as it makes no difference to a locomotive engine whether its motor power comes from the steam inside its own boiler, or from a push administered from without, provided always that the amount of power applied is the same; for its wheels, following their own laws of movement, will run precisely as far before stopping and no farther, in the one case as in the other. It is only when we come to the Applied Science of Political Economy, that is to say, to where the pure.

Science has to be applied to actual economic wheels unequally balanced at this point or that, that the distinction becomes of vital importance; as for example when it has to be applied to nations some of whom have large productive capacity, as fertile soil, human skill, energy, and inventive capacity, but have no transport facilities for carrying their products either to their own markets or to those of foreign nations, as in America before steam-power and railway communication opened up the West; or again where the Home Market is restricted, as in the slave States of the South before the cotton mills of Lancashire afforded an outlet; or where there is much acquired human skill of various kinds but neither Science, nor organising initiative nor machine production, as in India and the East; or where there is a sufficiency of productive powers, but no effective power of consumption to create a demand for the produce, owing to the mass of the people not being allowed to reap the fruits of their labour, as in the slave cultivation of the Roman Empire, or indeed in all agricultural countries where the peasants are exploited by despotism or unfavourable legislation, as in France before the Revolution, in peoples under Turkish rule everywhere, and in Ireland before the passage of the Land Acts, and so on.

In all these cases the national wheels are lop-sided, as it were, economically obstructed, maimed and imperfect; and it is because we must look to the applied science of Political Economy for remedies, that it is of prime importance to determine at the very outset, where or in what aspect of the self-moving wheel of wealth the motor power resides. For just as in the case of a paralyzed limb in the human body, if we are to apply our remedies with discretion and success, we must first of all ascertain whether the obstruction is in the limb itself or in the motor centres of the brain - otherwise, as is so often the case in the practice of quacks, we should find massage or electricity being vigorously applied to the limb, when the seat of the mischief is a blood-clot in the brain substance - so, too, is it with the applied science of Political Economy, where the first question we must answer is; - In which of the four fundamental and distinguishable factors of wealth production (all of which are in their several ways essential elements in the process) does the motor power specially reside? Is it in Production, or in Consumption, in the powers of Nature, or the powers of Man?

Now the orthodox school of Economists from the days of Adam Smith down to our own time has, owing to historical causes of which we shall see the significance in later chapters, always fixed the motor power from which wealth accumulation proceeds in the act of Production itself; and accordingly their one prescription for any falling off of trade or slowing of the wheels of industry, has always been, to go on producing more and yet more, leaving the consumption to take care of itself; on the ground, as Mill has it, that there will always be found in the world people enough and with desires enough to consume all that can by any possibility or likelihood be produced. Indeed had this not been the central core of their teaching, the orthodox Economists could not have ignored in their more recent works, as they have done, the assaults made on this very position by economists like Mr. Gunton, Mr. J. M. Robertson, and Mr. Hobson; any of whose arguments, it may be remarked in passing, ought, if there is any virtue in human reason, to have given the coup de grace to this absurdity at any time during the last two decades.

It is quite true that you can let Consumption take care of itself, if people can get for nothing what they have the capacity and wish to consume, or if you can always feel sure that they have the wherewithal to pay for it. But that is precisely the point. Do the orthodox Economists imagine that the world could be counted on to carry off all the enormous and ever increasing yearly output of products, if they had to do it on the wages of Russian serfs, of Turkish, or Irish, or Hindoo peasants, of distressed needlewomen, or of the sweated tailors of the East-end of London? And if not, why have they ruled out from the original data of their Science this enormous and all important factor of Consumption, with the wide disparity of degrees in which it can be indulged according to the wages and incomes of men? as if, indeed, Consumption always attended and followed close on the heels of Production as its lackey. They might as well rule out from the human organism the stomach and other organs of consumption, retaining only the brain, the arms, and the hands, and then assume that these latter, the organs of production, will still go on working, without the former, the organs of consumption.