CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. BOOK II. Economics as the Efforts. § 1. WE have seen that economics is, on the one side, a Science of Wealth; and, on the other, that part of the Social Science of man's action in society, that deals with regards his Efforts to satisfy his Wants, in so far as the efforts and Wealth as satisfying wants are capable of being measured in terms of wealth, or Wants and its general representative, i.e. money. We shall be occupied result of during the greater part of this volume with these wants and efforts, and the causes by which the prices that measure the wants are brought into equilibrium with those that measure the efforts. For this purpose we shall have to study in Book III. wealth in relation to the diversity of man's wants which it has to satisfy, and in Book IV. wealth in relation to the diversity of man's efforts by which it is produced. best to prelimi itself. But in the present Book, we have to inquire which of But it is all the things that are the result of man's efforts, and are make a capable of satisfying man's wants, are to be counted as Wealth; nary study and into what groups or classes these are to be divided. For of wealth there is a compact group of terms connected with Wealth itself, and with Capital, the study of each of which throws light on the others; while the study of the whole together is a direct continuation, and in some respects a completion, of that inquiry as to the scope and methods of economics on which we have just been engaged. And, therefore, instead of taking what may seem the more natural course of starting with an analysis of wants, and of wealth in direct relation BOOK II. to them, it seems on the whole best to deal with this of terms at once. CH. I. Principles cation. group In doing this we shall of course have to take some account of the variety of wants and efforts; but we shall not want to assume anything that is not obvious and a matter of common knowledge. The real difficulty of our task lies in another direction; being the result of the need under which economics, alone among sciences, lies of making shift with a few terms in common use to express a great number of subtle distinctions. § 2. As Mill says1:-" The ends of scientific classification of classifi- are best answered when the objects are formed into groups respecting which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than those which could be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed." But we meet at starting with the difficulty that those propositions which are the most important in one stage of economic development, are not unlikely to be among the least important in another, if indeed they apply at all. The diffi culties of which are their and their uses. In this matter economists have much to learn from the classifying recent experiences of biology: and Darwin's profound discusthings sion of the question throws a strong light on the difficulties changing before us. He points out that those parts of the structure characters which determine the habits of life and the general place of each being in the economy of nature, are as a rule not those which throw most light on its origin, but those which throw least. The qualities which a breeder or a gardener notices as eminently adapted to enable an animal or a plant to thrive in its environment, are for that very reason likely to have been developed in comparatively recent times. And in like manner those properties of an economic institution which play the most important part in fitting it for the work which it has to do now, are for that very reason likely to be in a great measure of recent growth3. 1 Logic, Bk. IV. ch. vII. Par. 2. 2 Origin of Species, ch. XIV. 3 Instances are found in many of the relations between employer and employed, between middleman and producer, between bankers and their two classes of clients, those from whom they borrow and those to whom they lend. |