There had in fact been over-production and a general glut. James Mill’s _Elements of Political Economy_[638] contain a careful demonstration that general gluts are impossible. It was emphatically a controversial passage, and in the pages of John Mill it has the look of an anachronism. All depended on the meaning of “general.” If it meant universal, the case was impossible. It is incredible that all without exception should have something to sell and no wish to buy. To offer anything for sale must of itself imply a desire to buy something else with it, either directly or by means of money. Even a very near approach to universality is not easy to understand; and it would mean simply that a bad organization of the world’s markets had prevented buyers and sellers from reaching each other, and prevented goods from going where they are wanted, at the time when they are wanted; it would mean that not the malady but the scale and degree of it had passed belief.[639] CHAPTER III. GENERAL GLUTS. French War and English Trade—English Currency—Bullion Committee—Restriction not the only Cause of High Prices—Ricardo on Currency—Tooke on Prices—Say on Gluts—English Trade from 1824—High and Low Wages—Some Fallacies of Malthus. The discussion on General Gluts was simply a phase of the discussions on Value; and the prominence of such discussions in the political economy of sixty years ago was largely due to the peculiar effects on trade and prices of a twenty years’ war with France. The theories of economists were becoming most abstract precisely at the time when the justest generalizations were most severely tested by abnormal conditions. Even if the Industrial Revolution heralded by the _Wealth of Nations_ had been allowed a free course, the new conditions of manufacture would have raised new economical questions; and they could not have failed to turn, to some extent, on the subject of value, which Adam Smith had by no means exhausted. But there was no free course. War was declared against England by France in 1793. In the same year Pitt was forced to offer English merchants a loan of public money, to cure a financial crisis. Then followed, under the long Tory supremacy, heavy taxes, repressive laws, and something more nearly approaching a war of classes than anything known in England before or since.