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 60 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

we meet with the change from quantity to quality if we see that the actress of whom everybody knows that she is the mistress of a millionaire is received in society, whereas the common prosti- tute who is perhaps a much nobler character, is banished to the street. Akin to prostitution is the marriage of interest, in which the purchased wife is always more to be pitied than the pur- chased husband, because she enters into matrimony with a greater part of herself. Theoretically, Simmel is perfectly right if he considers the marriage advertisement as a means to ration- alize life and so facilitate the meeting of differentiated people, which is otherwise left to chance. Practically he has to admit that only the pecuniary circumstances can be half-way clearly described, whereas outward appearance, character, etc., lie beyond any possibility of description. Two lamentable sides which the growing importance of money has possessed have also been masterfully represented by Simmel : corruption, which can be much more easily because more secretly accom- plished by money, and the decay of gentility, which is also deplored by Nietzsche. The exchangeability of things, the possibility of selling them at any moment, means a lowering of the standard. It serves to lay particular stress on the quantita- tive character a fact repellent to all noble-thinking individuals, who never ask after the " how much."

The relation of money to human values, the attempt to find the primitive value to which everything might be reduced even- tually is reorganized in labor, the most common possibility of reduction. The theory 1 which makes labor the creator of values is philosophically the most interesting of all theories of value, because there is not one side of human personality which could not be changed into labor, so that it might well be the common equivalent to all personal values. A difficulty is introduced by mental labor, which, as it does not raise the cost of the product, seems to leave the formation of value to muscular labor only. With great subtlety the arguments and counter-arguments are

1 Vide ADAM SMITH, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, p. 5; RICARDO, Principles of Political Economy, Vols. I and XX; MORSE, Kapital, passim; RODBERTUS, Zur Erkenntnis unserer staatswirtschaftlichen Zustande, passim; Sociale Brief e, passim; HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty.