There is a real exception where the accidental destruction removes some social difficulty. The great fire in London and the great fire in Chicago resulted in wonderful improvement. When an old city is built almost entirely of wood, each owner may think it to his interest to keep the old buildings. A great fire sweeps them all down and compels the rebuilding of the city on a new and higher standard. But the usual social result of accidental destruction is a loss. It is a use of wealth without a fulfilling of the purpose of production, the gratifying of wants. [Sidenote: Intentional destruction of wealth by the owner] 2. _The intentional destruction of wealth by the owner, to make trade good, benefits neither himself nor others._ The case in mind is one where there is full choice between keeping or losing the good, not such a case as the throwing overboard of a part of the cargo when the ship is in danger of sinking, in the hope thereby of saving the rest, or as the blowing up of buildings to prevent the spread of a fire. In such cases the destruction is inevitable without man's action; he merely tries to minimize it. The case in mind is the deliberate destruction of wealth that might be kept for use. One labor leader, for example, boasted that when he drank pop he always broke the bottle "to make trade good" by helping the glass industry. The refuting of this fallacy is one of the time-honored tasks in political economy. There is, it is true, an increase in the demand for glass and glass-blowers' labor, but without an increase in gratification; but at the same time there is a decrease in the demand for other goods which would afford additional gratification. The proverb, old in Shakespeare's time, runs, "Nothing can come of nothing." What is spent for one purpose cannot be for another; "you cannot eat your cake and have it too." A given income can be spent in one of many ways, but not in all ways or even in two ways at once. It is a question of this _or_ that. At the same moment that the demand for pop-bottles is increased, the demand for other things is decreased, possibly that for pop-corn or pop-guns or Populist papers--who can tell? Such a form of benevolence is a mistaken, uneconomic attempt to provide labor for one man by taking it from another. If the advocate of wealth-destruction would be consistent, he should break, not merely the pop-bottle, but the water-pitcher and the table as well; he should make a bonfire at least once daily of his clothing, his house, and its furnishings; he should advise blowing up the steamboat and ripping up the railroad when they have carried a single load of passengers. Thus, when all men were naked and starving, and civilization had sunk to savagery, trade would have been made as "good" as, by the policy of destruction, he could ever hope to make it. [Sidenote: Intentional destruction of others' wealth]