'disposable' population, which is employed in making luxuries for the landowners, and, finally, the 'redundant' or what he calls in his later book the 'excrescent' or 'superinduced' population,[408] which is really supported by foreign trade. Commerce, then, is merely 'the efflorescence of our agriculture.'[409] Were it annihilated this instant, we should still retain our whole disposable population. The effect of war is simply to find a different employment for this part of the nation. Napoleon, he says, is 'emptying our shops and filling our battalions.'[410] All the 'redundant' population might be supported by simply diminishing the number of our cart-horses.[411] Similarly, the destruction of the commerce of France 'created her armies.' It only transferred men from trade to war, and 'millions of artisans' were 'transformed into soldiers.'[412] Pitt was really strengthening when he supposed himself to be ruining his enemy. 'Excrescence' and 'efflorescence' are Chalmers's equivalent for the 'sterility' of the French economists. The backbone of all industry is agriculture, and the manufacturers simply employed by the landowner for such purposes as he pleases. Whether he uses them to make his luxuries or to fight his battles, the real resources of the nation remain untouched. The Ricardians insist upon the vital importance of 'capital.' The one economic end of the statesmen, as the capitalist class naturally thinks, should be to give every facility for its accumulation, and consequently for allowing it to distribute itself in the most efficient way. Chalmers, on the contrary, argues that we may easily have too much capital. He was a firm believer in gluts. He admits that the extension of commerce was of great good at the end of the feudal period, but not as the 'efficient cause' of wealth, only as 'unlocking the capabilities of the soil.'[413] This change produced the illusion that commerce has a 'creative virtue,' whereas its absolute dependence upon agriculture is a truth of capital importance in political economy. More Malthusian than Malthus, Chalmers argues that the case of capital is strictly parallel to the case of population.[414] Money may be redundant as much as men, and the real causes of every economic calamity are the 'over-speculation of capitalists,' and the 'over-population of the community at large.'[415] In this question, however, Chalmers gets into difficulties, which show so hopeless a confusion between 'capital,' income, and money, that I need not attempt to unravel his meaning.[416] Anyhow, he is led to approve the French doctrine of the single tax. Ultimately, he thinks, all taxes fall upon rent.[417] Agriculture fills the great reservoir from which all the subsidiary channels are filled. Whether the stream be tapped at the source or further down makes no difference. Hence he infers that, as the landlords necessarily pay the taxes, they should pay them openly. By