arrived at any conception of wealth, apart from the elaborate code and enactments of legal conventions which give to the individual in actual non-possession of wealth the right to acquire it, whereas I, from the application of the laws of energy to the problems of how men live, have arrived at such a conception."
We may leave the economists to deal with the Professor's charges if they think it worth while. To us ordinary folk it would be useful if he would be clearer as to what this conception really is. He has already confused and puzzled us by his example of the train and the coal, and on the subject of wealth he is even more bewildering. For he tells us that "the wealth of a community can only be increased by production and discovery, not by acquisition and exchange. In commerce and exchange for every plus there is a precisely equal minus." Has he really tumbled into that schoolboy's pitfall which makes folk believe that every merchant or dealer who makes a profit inflicts a loss on somebody else? It seems so, but surely Mark Twain was nearer the truth when he tells us how Tom Sawyer exchanged a tooth, lately pulled out of his own head, for a tick possessed by Huckleberry Finn, and the two boys then parted "each feeling wealthier than before." They were wealthier because each had got
