LEAVING Adam Smith and the problem of Free Trade and Protection behind us, we can now, without any essential interference with the historical evolution of our subject, jump at once to the revered name of John Stuart Mill; passing over Ricardo and the other economists of the intervening half century, on the double ground that in Mill we have not only the practical summing up of the separate labours of his predecessors, but, for the first time, the practical unfolding on a large canvas of all the fallacies concealed in germ in the original presuppositions of the Science bequeathed to him and his orthodox successors by Adam Smith, and retained by them in their fundamental outlines up to the present time; - as for example the symbol of the stick, instead of the wheel; the neglect, not so much of the fact of Consumption, which is, of course, always implied, as of any attempt to attach a scientific value to it as a factor whose variations affect all the other factors of the problem according to the laws which I have already laid down; and so on.

In my first draft of this division of my subject, I entered into a minute detailed criticism of the most important positions in Mill's work - his 'fundamental propositions' on capital, on rent, on wages, his 'tendency of profits to a minimum,' his remarks on the population question, on the effects of laissez-faire, competition, etc., - but on re-reading it I found that in themselves they would fill a small volume. It is from no disrespect, therefore, to the great position filled by Mill in the history of Political Economy, but simply owing to want of space, that I am compelled in consideration of the ground which still lies before me, to concentrate what I have to say solely on his cardinal principles, leaving to the student as a dialectical exercise the detection of the fallacies in his special arguments in each instance - a quite simple matter, I may remark, when once the inadequacy of his leading principles has been clearly set forth. When I say cardinal principles, I do not mean those ultimate principles of the Science which we have already discussed, but rather those smaller differentiations of them by which the progressive evolution of all Science proceeds.

But 1 hope to afford space enough for all the detail that is necessary to make good the conclusions as to Mill's teaching which I wish to establish; and with this economy of space secured, I shall, I trust, then be able to discuss at sufficient length the few great general issues in which the smaller detailed argumentations of his separate chapters eventuate. In thus restricting the volume of my remarks, I shall perhaps, after all, best meet the inclinations of my readers, by most of whom at this time of day a detailed discussion of Mill's separate chapters, in the face of the fresh ground that has been occupied since his time, would probably be felt to be more or less belated.

In carrying out this programme, then, I propose, to begin with, to exhibit the cardinal fallacy which pervades that entire section of his work dealing with his fundamental propositions on Capital, Wages, etc., and in order to escape any tedious to-and-fro detailed argumentation, I am anxious to find some mode of presentation whereby these fundamental propositions of his will only have to be stated to be seen to destroy one another without argument. And I shall assume-that I have succeeded, if I shall make it apparent that of each of the propositions on which he bases the derivative doctrinesof the Science, the exact opposite is equally true; much in the same way as a system of Astronomy would be proved to be false without detailed analysis, if it could be shown, for example, that basing itself professedly on, say, a centripetal force alone, it could only fully explain by the addition of an exactly opposite force, - the centrifugal, - the movement of each planet in its orbit. Now this is the case with all Mill's fundamental propositions respecting Capital, Wages, Savings, etc., as indeed we should know it must be if my earlier chapters re-constituting the Science on the symbol of the wheel, instead of on a divided straight line, should prove to be true.

For, beginning by leaving out Consumption as a factor to which a definite, and not merely an indeterminate, value and expression must be given, he cut the wheel of wealth in two, and throwing one half away, had only the other half left with which to operate in the construction of the laws of his Science; precisely like our perpetual-motion schemer, who while giving a definite scientific value to mechanical power, gave none to mechanical friction, and with equally disastrous results. And accordingly we have only to tabulate his propositions, one after another, to see that having left out half the wheel, he has in each case left out half the truth, and so rendered his whole system practically false. Let us take them in order. And as key-note to all the rest, take his statement that 'the limit of wealth is never deficiency of consumers, but of producers and productive power.' Now I must confess that had this sentence, taken in connection with both the economic laws and the practical consequences which flow from it, been penned by any other writer than John Stuart Mill, I should have had no hesitation in charging him with a deliberate intention to deceive his readers by a piece of intellectual sleight-of-hand, as discreditable to a philosopher as it might be admirable in a conjuror.

For if he means by a deficiency of consumers, the number of open mouths ready to be filled if they could have what is produced as a free gift, then the remark is both banal and irrelevant, inasmuch as Political Economy assumes that what is consumed must be purchased and paid for, otherwise it belongs to the ethics of charity, and not to the laws of Political Economy. But as, on the one hand, he was not the fool to make such a statement, and, on the other, was not the trickster who would willingly lay a trap for his readers, our only alternative is to assume that this sentence ought to read as follows, 'the limit of wealth is never deficiency of purchasers, but of producers and productive power' - an absurdity so transparent that it needs no refutation. And yet this single sentence of Mill's has proved a veritable intellectual fly-trap to most of his readers from his day to our own; and when once they have walked into it, innocently and unsuspiciously, he has captured them as effectually, and pledged them to the acceptance of each of his * fundamental propositions' in turn, as surely, as if they had been physical chains which he had wound round their necks and ankles.