364 THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT bk. vi

states that, un produit consomme ou detruit est un deboucheferme (I. i. ch. 15), appears to me to be the most directlyopposed to just theory, and the most uniformly contradictedby experience. Yet it directly follows from the new doc-trine, that commodities are to be considered only in theirrelation to each other,—not to the consumers. What, Iwould ask, would become of the demand for commodities,if all consumption except bread and water were suspendedfor the next half-year? What an accumulation of com-modities! Quels debouches! What a prodigious marketwould this event occasion! 1

Ricardo, however, was stone-deaf to what Malthus was saying. The last echo of the controversy is to befound in John Stuart Mill ’s discussion of his Wages-Fund Theory, 2 which in his own mind played a vitalpart in his rejection of the later phase of Malthus ,amidst the discussions of which he had, of course, beenbrought up. Mill ’s successors rejected his Wages-Fund Theory but overlooked the fact that Mill ’s re-futation of Malthus depended on it. Their methodwas to dismiss the problem from the corpus of Economics not by solving it but by not mentioning it. It alto-gether disappeared from controversy. Mr. Cairncross,searching recently for traces of it amongst the minorVictorians, 3 has found even less, perhaps, than mighthave been expected. 4 Theories of under-consumptionhibernated until the appearance in 18 8 9 of The Physiologyof Industry , by J. A. Hobson and A. F. Mummery , thefirst and most significant of many volumes in which fornearly fifty years Mr. Hobson has flung himself withunflagging, but almost unavailing, ardour and courage

1 Malthus ’s Principles of Political Economy, p. 363, footnote.

2 J. S. Mill, Political Economy, Book I. chapter v. There is a mostimportant and penetrating discussion of this aspect of Mill ’s theory inMummery and Hobson’s Physiology of Industry, pp. 38 et seq., and, inparticular, of his doctrine (which Marshall, in his very unsatisfactory dis-cussion of the Wages-Fund Theory, endeavoured to explain away) that“a demand for commodities is not a demand for labour”.

3 “The Victorians and Investment”, Economic History , 1936.

1 Fullarton’s tract On the Regulation of Currencies (1844) is the mostinteresting of his references.