[Footnote 212-2: So far _Senior_, Outlines, 66, is right: the richer a nation or a man becomes, the greater does the national or personal productive consumption become.] [Footnote 212-3: Such gigantic constructions as the palaces, pyramids, etc. of Egypt, Mexico or Peru are a certain sign of the oppression of the people by rulers, priests or nobles. One of the Egyptian pyramids is said to have occupied 360,000 men for twenty years. (_Diodor._, I, 63; _Herodot._, II, 175; _Prescott_, History of Mexico, I, 153, History of Peru, I, 18.)] [Footnote 212-4: Edinburg Rev., Apr., 1873, 399.] [Footnote 212-5: _Berkeley_, Querist, 168, 175, says that the national wants should be the guiding rule of commerce, and that besides, the most pressing wants of the majority should be first considered.] [Footnote 212-6: _Ricardo_, Principles, p. 475, was of opinion that an outlay of the national or of private income in the payment of personal services increased the demand for labor and the wages of labor in a higher degree than an equal outlay for material things. The error at the foundation of this is well refuted by _Senior_, Outlines, 160 ff. The first to zealously advocate and treat the theory of productive consumption was _J. B. Say_, Traité, III, ch. 2, seq.; Cours pratique, II, 265. But the germs of the doctrine are to be found in _Dutot_, Réflexions politiques sur le Commerce et les Finances, 1738, 974, _éd_. Daire. His distinctions are in part drawn with great accuracy. Thus he says that, among others, a manufacturer of cloth, productively consumes the results of his workmen, but that the workmen themselves who exchange these results for bread, consume the latter unproductively. _Say_ is guilty of the inconsistency of claiming that only that consumption is productive which contributes directly to the creation of material exchangeable goods, spite of the fact that he gave the productiveness of labor a much wider scope. _Rau_, Lehrbuch, I, § 102 ff., 323 seq., is more consistent in so far as he applies the same limitation in both cases. (Compare also § 333, 336.) _Hermann_, Staatsw. Untersuchungen, 170 seq., 231 ff., would prefer to see the idea of productive consumption banished from the science, for the reason that if the value of the thing alleged to be consumed continues, there can be no such thing as its consumption. But, I would rejoin: in a good national economy, there would be, according to this, scarcely any consumption whatever, because the aggregate value of that which I have called above productive consumption is unquestionably preserved, and continues in the aggregate value of the national products.