Look simply at the facts. Can anything be clearer than that the cause of the poverty which festers in the centers of civilization is not in the weakness of the productive forces? In countries where poverty is deepest, the forces of production are evidently strong enough, if fully employed, to provide for the lowest not merely comfort but luxury. The industrial paralysis, the commercial depression which curses the civilized world to-day, evidently springs from no lack of productive power. Whatever be the trouble, it is clearly not in the want of ability to produce wealth. It is this very fact—that want appears where productive power is greatest and the production of wealth is largest—that constitutes the enigma which perplexes the civilized world, and which we are trying to unravel. Evidently the Malthusian theory, which attributes want to the decrease of productive power, will not explain it. That theory is utterly inconsistent with all the facts. It is really a gratuitous attribution to the laws of God of results which, even from this examination, we may infer really spring from the mal-adjustments of men—an inference which, as we proceed, will become a demonstration. For we have yet to find what _does_ produce poverty amid advancing wealth. FOOTNOTES: [30] Principles of Political Economy, Book I., Chap. XIII., Sec. 2. [31] The rate up to 1860 was 35 per cent. each decade. BOOK III. THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION. CHAPTER I.—THE INQUIRY NARROWED TO THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION—NECESSARY RELATION OF THESE LAWS. CHAPTER II.—RENT AND THE LAW OF RENT. CHAPTER III.—INTEREST AND THE CAUSE OF INTEREST. CHAPTER IV.—OF SPURIOUS CAPITAL AND OF PROFITS OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR INTEREST. CHAPTER V.—THE LAW OF INTEREST. CHAPTER VI.—WAGES AND THE LAW OF WAGES. CHAPTER VII.—CORRELATION AND CO-ORDINATION OF THESE LAWS. CHAPTER VIII.—THE STATICS OF THE PROBLEM THUS EXPLAINED. The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists generally discover that with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first philosophical systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex, and a particular connecting chain, or principle, is generally thought necessary to unite every two seemingly disjointed appearances; but it often happens that one great connecting principle is afterward found to be sufficient to bind together all the discordant phenomena that occur in a whole species of things.—_Adam Smith_, _Essay on the Principles which Lead and Direct Philosophical Inquiries, as Illustrated by the History of Astronomy_. CHAPTER I. THE INQUIRY NARROWED TO THE LAWS OF DISTRIBUTION—THE NECESSARY RELATION OF THESE LAWS.