Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/498

476 the Twelve Tables, while they assisted in the creation of an enlightened jurisprudence; but they must often have unintentionally given a misleading impression of what the Twelve Tables originally meant. And it is because it seems to me that the great treatise of Professor Marshall is not altogether faultless in this respect that I venture to criticise some examples of his exegesis.

Professor Marshall has an excursus of eight pages on 'Ricardo's theory of Cost of Production in relation to Value.' It begins as follows:—

His argument is chiefly directed against the supposition that the Jevonsian or Austrian doctrine of utility is inconsistent with that of cost of production,—as laid down, for instance, by J. S. Mill in one of his two expositions of it, and as stated and criticised by Profeshor Sidgwick. Here Professor Marshall would seem to be in the right, if one who has no gift for the use of the abstract 'organon' can have an opinion. But there is the prior task of showing that what has come to be known as the Ricardian doctrine of cost of production was the doctrine of Ricardo; and here Professor Marshall is scarcely so successful. It is a point that deserves some attention; for Professor Marshall is pained to think that Rodbertus and Karl Marx should 'claim Ricardo's authority for the statement that the natural value of things consists solely of the labour spent on them;' and in a later passage he refers confidently to this note as proving that this 'premiss' of theirs is 'really as opposed to the general tenor of Ricardo's theory of value as it is to common sense.' This is the first proposition I would like to criticise.

Professor Marshall's argument rests on those sections (4, 5) of Ricardo's first chapter where he recognises that his principle that 'the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of