It cannot be said that Mill’s article had any conspicuous impact. I do not know any reference to it in the relevant contemporary literature. Mill himself, in writing his Principles, was obviously careful to avoid the dogmatism which his article had been intended to dissolve; and, reading between the lines, one can detect the fundamental outlook which it expressed. But he made no special point of it, as might have been expected; and what is said has certainly little of the cutting edge of the original article. Nevertheless something of this attitude seems to have entered the main tradition. You do not find in the literature of the next seventy-five years much of the dogmatism which sprang from the Law of Markets, although there was a professor here in this university of Oxford, the fabulous Bonamy Price, I who seems to have devoted some effort to proving the impossibility of underconsumption. And I imagine that if, for instance, Marshall had been challenged on the subject, he would have replied more or les~ on the lines of Mill’s article. Certainly that is the impression that I get from the account ofthe ups and downs oftrade in the early, jointly written Economics ofIndustry, often referred to by Dennis I Apparently he was a very corpulent man, and according to an .account which I had from the lips of Edgeworth, after the apolaustic meals of the Oxford Political Economy Club, he would sit back, arms resting forwards on an almost globular abdomen, statingin a high-pitched voice the sacred dogma:

‘There can be no general glut. ‘ 2 ‘But though men have the power to purchase they may not choose to use it. For when confidence has been shaken by failures, capital cannot be got to start new companies or extend old ones. Projects for new railways meet with no favour, ships lie idle, and there are no orders for new ships. There is scarcely any demand for the work of navvies, and not much for the work of the building and the engine-making trades. ,In short there is but little occupation in any of the trades which make Fixed capital. Those whose skill and capital is Specialised in these trades are earning little, and therefore buying little of the produce of other trades. Other trades, finding a poor market for their goods, produce less; they earn less, and therefore they buy less; the diminution of the demand for their wares makes them demand less of other trades. Thus commercial disorganization spreads, the disorganization of one trade throws others out of gear, and they react on it and increase its disorganization.

 ‘The chief cause of the evil is a want of confidence. The greater part of it could be removed almost in an instant if confidence could return, touch all industries with her magic wand, and make them continue their production and their demand for the wares of others. If all trades which make goods for direct consumption agreed to work on and to buy each other’s goods as ‘in ordinary times, they would supply one another with the means of earning a moderate rate of profits and of wages. The trades which make Fixed capital might have to wait a little longer, but they too would get employment when confidence had revived so far that those who had capital to invest had made up their minds how to invest it. Confidence by growing would cause itself to grow; credit would give increased means of purchase, and thus prices would recover. Those in trade already would make good profits, new  Robertson. The same can be said of Pigou’s early work on fluctuation in the first edition of the Economics of Welfare and of Lavington’s monograph The Trade Cycle. The fact is that the nature of the great controversies of the half-century after Mill’s death was not such as to focus attention on the accumulation process as such.

There was much discussion ofthe value of money and possible ways of maintaining greater stability – bimetallism, the tabular standard for contracts, the compensated dollar. There was much discussion of the nature of capital and the necessity of interest. But apart frOIn what Keynes called the underworld of heresy, which, for the most part, simply reiterated the sort of thing which Spence and Malthus had said before, I there was little discussion of the macro-economic effects of saving or the benefits to development of accumulation.