Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/48

 pains of one man can be compared with those of another.

I cite these difficulties here, not with a view of presenting ready solutions, but because they affect the substance of nearly all my later thought and writing. I did not even grasp them in their full significance at the time, and they proved to be sources of some confusion when I came to formulate my economics in terms of “human value.” In the nineties my mind was fumbling after the conception and expression of an economics which was more art than science, and, therefore, more qualitative than quantitative in its estimate of value, wealth, cost, and utility. But the full significance of this revolt against a distinctively quantitative science did not emerge until a good deal later.

For while I was engaged in the Ruskinian service, I also occupied myself in the more definitely economic task of an analysis of the different sorts and conditions of bargain and marketing by which the distribution or apportionment of wealth among the owners of the several factors of production took place. This was the beginning of my various endeavours to express intelligibly my growing realization of the injustice, inhumanity, and waste in those processes of price-fixing which determined the respective payments made to landowners, capitalists, employers, and the various classes of workers. What first prompted me to this endeavour was my sense of the unsatisfactory way