For in this problem of market-price, it is necessary to keep our sight 'dilated,' as Bacon would say, rather than contracted to a pin point, if we are to bring the subject into just relation and perspective with the other aspects of the Science, as parts of a harmonious whole.

Leaving Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk, then, with their reduc-tion of the problem of Value to its one-sided function of being a mere register of degrees of mental or bodily satisfaction, or Utility, let us now see what is the attitude of the English School of Economists to this doctrine.

In his discussion of the problem of Value, Professor Marshall, while leaning on the whole to the Labour-cost side of Mill and Ricardo, ends by making a compromise; but this he gets rather by ' splitting the difference' between them and Jevons, than by any such firm handling of the problem as would necessitate a reconstruction of the other fundamental propositions of the school of Mill, to which, indeed, in a hesitating way, he still in the main adheres. He declares, quite justly, in opposition to Jevons, that value depends as much on 'final' labour-cost as on 'final utility,' and strikes down on the truth very happily when he says that the cost and the satisfaction mutually determine each other, like a number of balls in a bowl, or like the separate blades of a pair of scissors, both of which are needed for cutting. That this was a lucky hit on the part of Professor Marshall, rather than a real illumination, is rendered probable by the fact that, if followed up, it would have revolutionized his whole Political Economy; for it would have led him to the introduction of the factor of Consumption as a definite, and not merely an indeterminate, element in the science.

For if the upper blade of his pair of scissors stands for Production, or Labour-cost, his lower blade must stand for Consumption, or Utility; and the two together would - had he seen that the problem was a dynamical one - have led him to the wheel (or some other dynamical construction) as the true symbol and central principle from which all the doctrines of Political Economy are to be deduced. But he did not see that any double-sided phenomenon, economic or other, in which the two sides or aspects are so connected as to mutually determine each other, must be a dynamical one, and follow dynamical laws; and so his system, as a whole, is as statical in its nature and methods as that of either Mill or Ricardo. Instead, therefore, of revolutionizing all his doctrines, this chance apercu remained with him barren and alone, and bore no further fruit; it was a gleam of true perception in the midst of the general sand-desert of refinements and distinctions of the academic Political Economy.

The only English Economist who has arrived at a true theory of the nature of Value by an exhaustive analysis of all its sides, and one which is in harmony with all his other views, - and not, as with Marshall, in contradiction to most of them, - is Mr. Hobson, whose work the academic Economists have so long affected to ignore. In his 'Economics of Distribution,' he has shown that Value is always a relation, whether you regard it from the Labour-cost side of Mill and Ricardo, or from the Utility side of Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk. If you take it from the Labour side, the value of anything is, he contends, a relation between the Labour-cost (acting on natural resources) which constitutes the limits of 'supply'; and the work you are to get out of it, when backed by your power to purchase it, - as, for example, the work of a ton of coals, or the vital energy from a loaf of bread, - which constitutes the 'effective demand.' Or, if you take it from the mental, or Utility, side, it is a relation between the strain on brain or nerves, involved in the disagreeableness of getting a thing, which constitutes the supply, and the satisfaction which it will bring you, when acquired, which determines and regulates the demand.

And with this analysis I quite agree.

Now, It will be observed that the above solutions of the problem of Value which have followed one another in line from the time of Ricardo and Mill to the present day, have all been arrived at by the same general process or method of approach, - by the point to point inspection, namely, of the different aspects of the mechanism of exchange, and of the relation of its various parts with each other. But as this mechanism in its actual running is very complicated, so that the whole has to be arrested, as it were, before each point can be inspected, and started going; again; and as without some general idea of what it all means beforehand, it is difficult to combine these separate observations into a harmonious conception of the whole, - much in the same way as it would be difficult to understand from the inside of a watch what its intricate mechanism meant, unless one came to it with some understanding of the meaning of the hands on its face; or of a printing machine, without a prior knowledge of the general fact that the paper that went in blank at one end, was to come out in printed columns and pages at the other; - 'reflecting on this, and on how easy it is to go astray when one goes searching about among a miscellany of hitherto unconnected objects or operations as with a candle in the dark, and on how, if a single essential item is overlooked, or not seen on all its sides in its true relation with all the rest, the real meaning and interpretation of the whole is obscured and falsified: and remembering besides, that as a result of this method of approach, the problem of Value which we are now considering has taken nearly a hundred years for the true solution, given to it by Mr. Hobson by this method, to appear; reflecting on all this, I say, the question naturally occurs to one, as to whether the problem might not have been solved more simply and broadly in another way, namely by an approach from the outside as it were, and in terms more consonant with the ordinary usage of business men, and more suitable for the practical purposes of an applied Science of Political Economy; and as to whether by some more illuminating method than this of the candle, other factors and powers whose significance has only been dimly or half perceived, may not be brought more fully into the light.