in 1871; Menger's Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, also in 1871; Cairnes' Leading Principles in 1874.

Thus when Marshall began, Mill and Ricardo still reigned supreme and unchallenged. Roscher, of whom Marshall often spoke, was the only other influence of importance. The notion of applying mathematical methods was in the air. But it had not yet yielded anything substantial. Cournot's Principes Mathématiques de la Théorie des Richesses (1835) is mentioned by Marshall in the Preface to the first edition of the Principles of Economics as having particularly influenced him; but I do not know at what date this book first came into his hands.1 This, and the natural reaction of Ricardo on a Cambridge mathematician of that date, with perhaps some hints of algebraical treatment in the arithmetical examples of Mill's Book III. chapter xviii.,3 on "International Values," were all that Marshall had to go upon in the first instance. An account of the progress of his thought from 1867 to his American trip in 1875, which Marshall himself put into writing, is appropriate at this point::

2

"While still giving private lessons in mathematics, he translated as many as possible of Ricardo's reasonings into mathematics; and he endeavoured to make them more general. Meanwhile he was attracted towards the new views of economics taken by Roscher and other German economists; and by Marx, Lassalle and other Socialists. But it seemed to him that the analytical methods of the historical economists were not

1 For a complete bibliography of early hints and foreshadowings of mathematical treatment see the appendix to Irving Fisher's edition of Cournot's book. Fleeming Jenkin's brief paper of 1868 was not generally available until 1870, but was certainly known to Marshall about that date (see his review of Jevons in The Academy, 1872). Jevons' Brief Account of a General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy was presented to the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1862 and published in the Statistical Journal in 1866; but this paper does not actually contain any mathematical treatment at all. Its purpose is to adumbrate the idea of "the coefficient of utility (i.e. final utility), and to claim that this notion will allow the foundations of economics to be worked out as a mathematical extension of the hedonistic calculus.

2 This was the age of Clerk Maxwell and W. K. Clifford, when the children of the Mathematical Tripos were busy trying to apply its apparatus to the experimental sciences. An extension to the moral sciences was becoming obvious. Boole and Leslie Ellis, a little earlier, were an important influence in the same direction. Alfred Marshall, in 1867, trained as he was, an intimate of W. K. Clifford, turning his attention to Ricardo, was bound to play about with diagrams and algebra. No other explanations or influences are needed.

Particularly §§ 6-8, which were added by Mill to the third edition (1852). This account was contributed by him to a German compilation of Portraits and Short Lives of leading Economists. 5 1867.

always sufficiently thorough to justify their confidence that the causes which they assigned to economic events were the true causes. He thought indeed that the interpretation of the economic past was almost as difficult as the prediction of the future. The Socialists also seemed to him to underrate the difficulty of their problems, and to be too quick to assume that the abolition of private property would purge away the faults and deficiencies of human nature. . . . He set himself to get into closer contact with practical business and with the life of the working classes. On the one side he aimed at learning the broad features of the technique of every chief industry; and on the other he sought the society of trade unionists, co-operators and other working-class leaders. Seeing, however, that direct studies of life and work would not yield much fruit for many years, he decided to fill the interval by writing a separate monograph or special treatise on Foreign Trade; for the chief facts relating to it can be obtained from printed documents. He proposed that this should be the first of a group of monographs on special economic problems; and he hoped ultimately to compress these monographs into a general treatise of a similar scope to Mill's. After writing that larger treatise, but not before, he thought he might be ready to write a short popular treatise. He has never changed his opinion that this is the best order of work; but his plans were overruled, and almost inverted, by the force of circumstances. He did indeed write the first draft of a monograph on Foreign Trade; and in 1875 he visited the chief seats of industry in America with the purpose of studying the problem of Protection in a new country. But this work was suspended by his marriage; and while engaged, in conjunction with his wife, in writing a short account of the Economics of Industry, forcibly simplified for working-class readers, he contracted an illness so serious that for some time he appeared unlikely to be able to do any more hard work. A little later he thought his strength might hold out for recasting his diagrammatic illustrations of economic problems. Though urged by the late Professor Walras about 1873 to publish these, he had declined to do so; because he feared that if separated from all concrete study of actual conditions, they might seem to claim a more direct bearing on real problems than they in fact had. He began, therefore, to supply some of the requisite limitations and conditions, and thus was written the kernel of the fifth book of his Principles. From that kernel the present volume

in Marina, a judgment adequate or were treatment. Northheless it undenstedig gare Jevons priority of publication as regarde toe group of ideas connected with marginal" (or, as derona called is, "final", utility. Marshall's references to the gration of priority are extremely reserved. He is careful to leare Jerona' claim undisputed, whilst pointing out, indirectly, but quite clearly and definitely, that his own work owed little or nothing to devons.2

# Profund bey Tut, edition of Principles of Economics.

* Ren, particularly, (1) his footnote relating to his use of the term "marginal' Prothes by Principles, 1st ed.), where he implies that the word was suggested to

In 1872 Marshall reviewed1 Jevons' Political Economy in The Academy. This review, while not unfavourable, is somewhat cool and it points out several definite errors. "The main value of the book," it concludes, "does not lie in its more prominent theories, but in its original treatment of a number of minor points, its suggestive remarks and careful analyses. We continually meet with old friends in new dresses. . . . Thus it is a familiar truth that the total utility of any commodity is not proportional to its final degree of utility. . . . But Prof. Jevons has made this the leading idea of the costume in which he has displayed a large number of economic facts." When, however, Marshall came, in later years, to write the Principles his desire to be scrupulously fair to Jevons and to avoid the least sign of jealousy is very marked. It is true that in one passage 3 he writes: "It is unfortunate that here as elsewhere Jevons' delight in stating his case strongly has led him to a conclusion, which not only is inaccurate, but does mischief.... But he says elsewhere: 4 There are few writers of modern times who have approached as near to the brilliant originality of Ricardo as Jevons has done," and "There are few thinkers whose claims on our gratitude are as high and as various as those of Jevons."

In truth, Jevons' Theory of Political Economy is a brilliant, but hasty, inaccurate and incomplete brochure, as far removed

him, as a result of reading von Thünen (though von Thünen does not actually use the word), before Jevons' book appeared (in his British Association paper of 1862, published in 1866, Jevons uses the term "coefficient of utility "), that, after its appearance, he temporarily deferred to Jevons and adopted his word "final" (e.g. in the first Economics of Industry), and that later on he reverted to his original phrase as being the better (it is also an almost literal equivalent of Menger's word "Grenznutzen "); and (2) his footnote to Book III. chap. vi. § 3 on Consumers' Rent (or Surplus) where he writes (my italics) : “ The notion of an exact measurement of Consumers' Rent was published by Dupuit in 1844. But his work was forgotten; and the first to publish a clear analysis of the relation of total to marginal (or final) utility in the English language was Jevons in 1871, when he had not read Dupuit. The notion of Consumers' Rent was suggested to the present writer by a study of the mathematical aspects of demand and utility under the influence of Cournot, von Thünen and Bentham."

1 I believe that Marshall only wrote two reviews in the whole of his life-this review of Jevons in 1872, and a review of Edgeworth's Mathematical Psychics in 1881.

2 The main interest of the review, which is, so far as I am aware, A. M.'s first appearance in print (at thirty years of age), is, perhaps, the many respects in which it foreshadows Marshall's permanent attitude to his subject.

3 p. 166 (3rd ed.).

In the Note on Ricardo's Theory of Value, which is, in the main, a reply to Jevons.

as possible from the painstaking, complete, ultra-conscientious, ultra-unsensational methods of Marshall. It brings out unforgettably the notions of final utility and of the balance between the disutility of labour and the utility of the product. But it lives merely in the tenuous world of bright ideas,1 when we compare it with the great working machine evolved by the patient, persistent toil and scientific genius of Marshall. Jevons saw the kettle boil and cried out with the delighted voice of a child; Marshall too had seen the kettle boil and sat down silently to build an engine.

Meanwhile Marshall worked on at the generalised diagrammatic scheme, disclosed in his papers on the Pure Theory of Foreign Trade and Domestic Values. These must have been substantially complete about 1873 and were communicated to his pupils (particularly to Sir H. H. Cunynghame) about that date. They were drafted as non-consecutive 2 chapters of The Theory of Foreign Trade, with some Allied Problems relating to the Doctrine of Laisser Faire, which he nearly completed in 1875-7 after his return from America, embodying the results of his work from 1869 onwards.3 In 1877 he turned aside to write the Economics of Industry, with Mrs. Marshall. In 1879 Henry Sidgwick, alarmed at the prospect of Marshall's right of priority being taken from him, printed them for private circulation and copies were sent to leading economists at home and abroad. These chapters, which are now very scarce, have never been published to the world at large, but the most significant parts of them were incorporated in Book V. chaps. xi. and xii. of the Principles of Economics, and (fifty years after their origination) in Appendix J of Money Credit and Commerce.

Marshall's mathematical and diagrammatic exercises in Economic Theory were of such a character in their grasp, comprehensiveness and scientific accuracy and went so far beyond the "bright ideas" of his predecessors, that we may justly claim him as the founder of modern diagrammatic economics-that elegant apparatus which generally exercises a powerful attraction

1 How disappointing are the fruits, now that we have them, of the bright idea of reducing Economics to a mathematical application of the hedonistic calculus of Bentham!

2 The last proposition of Foreign Trade (which comes first) is Prop. XIII.; the first of Domestic Values is Prop. XVII.

366 Chiefly between 1869 and 1873"-see Money Credit and Commerce, p. 330.

4 See the Preface to the first edition of the Principles. Jevons refers to them in the 2nd edition of his Theory, published in 1879; and Pantaleoni reproduced much of them in his Principii di Economia Pura (1889).