130 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
ical Economy," and so, "the constant striving of economic progress is towards taking commodities out of the category of values, and mak- ing them pure utilities like the rain and the sunshine." This, the true goal, is obscured by "the necessity of measuring the results of economic action." The reasonableness of distribution of income according to product is maintained, only to be followed by a presentation of the difficulties of an attempt at payment by results.
In the discussion of the "standard of comfort" it is well maintained that there is a cost which determines value. " Cost gives its value to goods because it first gets this value from other goods and can continue getting it. It is quite true that here cost of production determines value. But it is not all or every cost. It is the cost that is itself first determined by its product ... it is the Donegal peasant claiming a certain minimum wage in lacemaking because she was directly produc- ing the equivalent of that wage in other circumstances." But the wage earned cannot, by mere insistence, extort a higher wage. For cost is not what the worker consumes but what he produces. Just on this account " the standard of comfort is a sure and certain thing which the worker is right to hold to, and that with all his might, because it is his own." Furthermore, it is shown that any trade union restriction of product is economically prejudicial to the laborers, and can be defended only occasionally on the ground of " the good life," which does not live by bread alone.
The writer's experience as a manufacturer gives force to his essay on "the sliding scale." His summing up is, that this system has the sanction of making wages follow price ; that it merely formulates what is already done, and gains by peace what otherwise is decided by war ; that antagonists in other respects declare that it can and does work ; that the experimental period is past. The essay on "woman's wages" disposes of the so-called explanations for lower rate in supply and demand, auxiliary wage, and lower standard of comfort, as based upon the misconception that wants regulate wages. It finds the true explana- tions in the smaller efficiency of woman's labor, and the "cheap goods" quality of her product, giving rise to a customary wage on the level of bare subsistence, and it points for remedy partly to combination but that only along with men and partly to economic enlightenment. Under the title of "a mere commodity" bimetallism by international agreement is shown to be the rational solution of the money problem. Again and again the thought in this essay is most striking. It is a misfor-
