Even within the very last year, it is a matter of the most public notoriety that the cotton manufactures, the woollen manufactures, the linen manufactures, the silk manufactures, have all fallen below the costs of production, including ordinary profits. To go no further, the amount of these manufactures, taken together, must, on a rough estimate, exceed seventy millions of pounds sterling. And if this mass of commodities, partly from over production and over trading, and partly from their necessary consequences, the shock to confidence and credit and the diminution of bills of exchange and currency, have fallen below the ordinary costs of production, what man is there credulous enough to believe that there must have been, according to the language of Mr. Mill, “a corresponding deficiency of supply, and hence a rise of exchangeable value beyond cost of production in other instances”? I doubt, indeed, much, whether satisfactory evidence could be brought to show that a single million’s worth of goods has risen above the cost of production, while seventy millions’ worth have fallen below it. Consequently, if the definition of a general glut be a fall in a great mass of commodities below the costs of production, not counterbalanced by a proportionate rise of some other equally large mass of commodities above the costs of production, Mr. Mill’s conclusion against the existence of a general glut, founded on “a chain of reasoning perfectly indissoluble,” seems to be utterly without foundation. If facts so notorious as these to which I have adverted are either boldly denied, or considered as undeserving attention, in founding the theories of political economy, there is an end at once to the utility of the science.