Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/633

 REVIEWS 611 terms as the science which treats of man as a member of economic society'; and he considers that three conceptions of it have prevailed in different quarters at different times. He first lays stress on ' economic' goods or wealth, the scond on the relation of these economic. goods to man, and the third on man in his relations to economic goods; and he traces a change in the development of the study as the first. conception has given way to the second, and the second to the third. He then discusses the different departments of political economy, its different methods, and its utility. This summary will show that. Professor Ely's book is suggestive and stimulating by its very freshness and independence of treatment, while he is tolerant and yet candid in his criticism of the views of others and the expression of his own. His book should, we venture to think, fulfil the object for which it is intended; and, as he himself says, in the Chataugua Literary and Scientific Circle, it has already secured a ' truly immense public.' L, L, PRICE Pri,,cilles of Econo,ics. BY Vol. I. Second Edition. PROFESSOR ALFRED Macmillan and Co. MARSHALL, IN the preface to the second edition of this volume its author tells us: ' To myself personally, the chief interest of the volume centres in Book V.: it contains more of my life's work than any other part; and it is there more than anywhere else that I have tried to deal with unsettled questions of the science.' The import of this confession will be understood when it is observed that the book thus referred to consists partly of the mathematical theory of Supply-and-Demand, and partly of the almost equally severe reasoning applied specially to. Supply, which in the first edition formed the subject of a separate book, entitled ' Cost of Production.' The rearrangement according to which an extra book is no longer devoted to production appears conformable to the 'symmetry of the relations in which demand and supply stand to value.' This symmetry is justly regarded by Professor Marshall as ' fundamental.' While others have been disputing whether it is cost-of-production or final-utility which determines value, he has discerned that it is both. His predecessors have tilted against each other from opposite sides of the shield of truth: he alone has surveyed with equal eye both the gold side, which most attracted Ricardo, and the silver side, on which Jevons fixed too exclusive attention. An able champion of that one-sided theory which is at,, present most in vogue has compared the point at issue to the question --a question, it is implied, admitting of only one answer whether it, is the sun which revolves round the planets or the planets round the stm. To a mind of a mathematical cast like Professor MarshaH's, it. is quite intelligible that of two bodies one does not revolve round the other more than the other round the one. ' Just as the motion of every body in the solar system affects,and is affected by the motion of every other, so it is with the elements of the problem of political economy.' ' RR2