Page:International Trade, An Application of Economic Theory.djvu/18

 must be regarded solely as an instrument for getting commodities into the hands of consumers.

The scientific measurement of industrial prosperity would consist in an assessment of real incomes as expressed in goods and services paid to members of the community in return for the use of some capital or labour-power which they possessed, or as a pension, valued according to some objective or subjective standard of utility. The services here included in real income would comprise all official, professional, domestic, and other personal services bought and paid for by the money income of members of the community. Such services, though generally admitted to be wealth, are usually excluded from considerations of the industrial condition of a nation, and are sometimes excluded from estimates of the national income. But, however convenient for some purposes, this exclusion is quite unjustified. The real income of a nation, as of an individual, must be held to consist of all the utilities, whether embodied in material forms or in human services, which it is able to command, A nation which devotes a larger proportion of its productive energy to increasing the speed and accuracy of the distribution of material goods, or to the better cultivation of the intellectual arts and the provision of professional, artistic, and recreative services, cannot reasonably be regarded as stationary or retrogressive in industrial prosperity. If we describe the money income of the British