Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/786

 764 THE ECONOMIC JOURN-L existing and not non-existent. This is not Mallet's language, but it seems to be his argument; and he sides here with Mr. MacLeod and Mr. Atkinson, against Mill. In the same way, against Leone Levi, he rejects the distinction between gross and net national income on the ground that the net income of the country would come to mean nothing but small annual savings: all the wealth accruing for actual enjoy- ment wou, ld be struck out of the estimate (179). These positions seem perfectly valid, though there is much in the latter part of the paper that is questionable. The statement that money is the best measure of sacrifice, in taxation (187), needs qualification; and the remark that capital is simply' accumulated labour' (188) would carry our author beyond his own conclusions. It strikes us too that his arguments against the complete exemption of so called ' necessaries' from taxation are not in perfect keeping with the hostility of Cobden to the very principle of indirect taxation and his often-avowed love of the income- tax (see e.g. 190, 201, cf. Cobden's speech of 28th April, 1853, against Mr. Gladstone's proposal to abolish the income-tax). The remainder of Mallet's book consists of papers which (unlike those already mentioned) have not before beeh published, and relate more or less closely to pure theory. He thinks that the orthodox Ricardian School of Economists tended to favour (or at least not emphatically enough to discountenance) what he counts 'arbitrary and artificial methods of social regeneration,' and they did so because they had not the clear view of the connection between private property and free exchange taught by the French School, from Condillac to Bastiat. The implicit socialism of Ricardo's conclusions was long ago pointed out by the Ricardian De Quincey (see Mallet, p. 309). In opposition to these conclusions Mallet follows Condillac and Bastiat in founding value not on labour, but on utility and difficulty of attainment combined (cf. 299 n.); he holds accordingly with Bastiat that there is no division to be made between the Ricardian ' natural monopolies' (cf. 267, 27, 280) and other commodities as regards value, value being in all cases deter- mined by the equivalence of services: and he applies these principles more particularly to land. ' It is the function of adapting supply to demand by restraining the undue pressure of the latter on the former, which constitutes the value of the land:' and this is the ' service' which the proprietor of the soil renders to society (265). This con- clusion is further said to imply (276) that the only way to increase the supply of a natural monopoly is to make it private property, and give it value, by making it really a monopoly. Condensation of language is responsible for this paradox. The meaning intended was probably that the commodities got from such sources as are called by the Ricardians ' natural monopolies' can only be increased if the natural monopolies themselves are made private property. A critic might remark that property in the goods produced from land does not neces- sarily involve property in the land itself. But the complete chain of argument is as follows: Without division of labour, no wealth;