The truth is that if Production and Consumption keep pace with each other, as indeed they do, and must do, in the continuous movements of a wheel of wealth reproduction, it is not because - consumption can be relied on to keep pace with production, but that the production adapts itself to the consumption - quite a different matter and one which if neglected would land us in all the practical impossibilities involved in working with 'the cart before the horse'! The question is not what capacity or desire men have for consuming in the abstract, but to what extent their wages and incomes will permit of it in actual fact and in the concrete. And if we were right in contending a few pages back that it is the number of sales over the retail counters of the world that determines the number of factories, mills, and workshops that are kept running, of lands and mines that are opened, of railways and bridges that are built, etc., that alone ought to have been enough to settle once and for all where the motor power in the wheel of wealth resides; and further, if these retail transactions differ in every nation from year to year and generation to generation, that again ought to prove conclusively how fatal it must be for any system of Political Economy to deduce its laws and fundamental doctrines from a set of primary data in which this all important constituent factor, Consumption, is entirely ruled out.

It is only another variant on the old and hackneyed illustration of the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet himself left out. For not only is Consumption the soul and animating principle that urges forward all the other factors engaged in the production and reproduction of wealth, but it is the controlling factor as well, the factor that sets the pace to all the rest; just as in the animal body it is the persistency and urgency of the appetite which determine the efforts that will he made to satisfy it. That it is the controlling and limiting factor is seen also in the fact that it can, like the power of the Tribunes of the People in the old Roman Commonwealth, veto and arrest the motions and actions of all the other powers concerned; for if, as we have already seen, things are not consumed, or likely to be consumed, they will cease to be reproduced; and it is for the solution of the problem of wealth reproduction and increase, it must be remembered, that an applied science of Political Economy is wanted, and not for mere production as such, left, as it is by the orthodox economists, like a foundling, to such casual chances of consumption as may be available to carry it off.

The first principle then which has to be added to the pure science of Political Economy to turn it into an Applied Science is, that both the motor and the controlling factor in the wheel of wealth have their seat in that one side or aspect of it which we have distinguished as Consumption; or, in other words, it is to the relative largeness of the share of wealth produced which falls to the great masses of the population in their capacity as consumers that we must look if we are to put the greatest possible pressure on all the available powers of Nature engaged in production - on wind, water, steam, electricity, etc. - as well as on the powers of Man, his invention, organization, division of labour, and what not. And the reason that this pressure is so effective not only in reproducing what is being continually consumed, but in adding so greatly to the amount of that reproduction, is, that all these powers of Nature, and of human invention and organization, are ready and waiting (if we will only reach out our hands to them and grasp them), to add their immense economic powers to the limited physical powers of Man. If, for example, the effective demand for consumption is so great anywhere that the spade and the hoe, the wheelbarrow, the horse and cart, and the spinning wheel, are not able to keep pace with it, men's inventions are at once stimulated to seek for devices which shall secure more effective aids; and presently some one comes along who puts a little water into a boiler and converts it into steam, or invents an electric engine, or a steam plough, or a power loom, or a locomotive and railway train, when lo! he will find that these will reproduce for him in a given time a thousand times the quantity of economic wealth (after all the labour spent in making them is deducted) that was possible before.

But the point I wish to emphasise especially here is that unless the market for consumption is large enough to carry off this excess of wealth production, these machines will either not be invented, or if invented will not be used. No one, for example, would either seek to invent or to use, say a steam mowing-machine if it were merely for the purpose of cutting the grass on the lawn in front of his house, when a scythe or ordinary hand mower would do practically all that was wanted, and at less cost. This then is the first principle or law of our Applied Science of Political Economy, namely that it is to the extent of the market for Consumption that we must primarily look for the increased reproduction of wealth.

And now in what respect, it may be asked, does this doctrine differ from that of the orthodox Economists? In this, that whereas our doctrine ascribes the increase of wealth to a positive power of productiveness residing in those powers of Nature which are so superior to our own, and which, the demand for consumption calls forth as gratuitous gifts to Man, powers whereby from a single seed a hundred may be made to grow, or from a new machine a thousand articles of wealth may be turned out with the same time and labour as one before; the orthodox Economists on the other hand ascribe this increase to a negative element, namely to the amount that can be saved out of former wealth-production, owing to the wage earners costing less to feed and clothe them than before - before, that is to say, these inventions had cheapened their articles of living. Mill, in particular, made himself almost merry over the idea that the extent of the market for consumption could in any way increase the wealth from which either an increase of profits or of wages could be drawn.