CONSUMPTION 89 



can be spent upon schoolhouses and churches, upon books and periodi- 

 cals, upon literature and music and art. The wife may be let to stay 

 at home and keep the house; the children be given their time to 

 acquire an education and to secure for themselves a thorough prepara- 

 tion for their work in life. 



Let me not be understood as quarreling with this potato philoso- 

 phy of wages so far as the assumption which underlies it, viz., that 

 population will inevitably keep close up to the limits of subsistence 

 on the kind of food, whatever that may be, which forms the popular 

 diet, is justified by the facts of society, as it very widely is. I only 

 claim that, in any country whose people had shown the capability of 

 setting bounds to the increase of population by the exercise of their 

 own judgment and will, cheap food would become a means of increasing 

 the comforts and luxuries enjoyed by that people in other directions 

 of expenditure, or of enlarging the capital and improving the produc- 

 tive agencies at their command. 



As a means of checking the increase of numbers, which otherwise 

 would surely carry population to the point of misery, famine, and 

 pestilence, the appearance of almost any economic want must be 

 greeted as a good, without much respect to the origin or object of 

 that want. But the moment the capability of self-limitation of popu- 

 lation is assured, the economist discovers wide differences between the 

 various demands for the consumption of the existing body of wealth, 

 made by the differing appetites and desires of different communities, 

 or of different classes in the same community, as regards the influences 

 of those various forms of consuming wealth upon the power and dis- 

 position to create values in the future. 



It is here we find the body of economic literature most deficient. 

 We need a new Adam Smith, or another Hume, to write the economics 

 of consumption in which would be found the real dynamics of wealth; 

 to trace to their effects upon production the forces which are set in 

 motion by the uses made of wealth; to show how certain forms of 

 consumption clear the mind, strengthen the hand, and elevate the 

 aims of the individual economic agent, while promoting that social 

 order and mutual confidence which are favorable conditions for the 

 complete development and harmonious action of the industrial system; 

 how other forms of consumption debase and debauch man as an eco- 

 nomic agent, and introduce disorder and waste into the complicated 

 mechanism of the productive agencies. Here is the opportunity for 

 some great moral philosopher, strictly confining himself to the study 



