THE NATURE OF VALUATION—HUMAN-NATURE VALUES AND INSTITUTIONAL VALUES—RELATION BETWEEN THE TWO—VALUES ARE PHASES OF AN ORGANIC WHOLE—AN OBJECT MAY HAVE MANY KINDS OF VALUE—VALUATION MOSTLY UNCONSCIOUS—DEFINITE VALUATION BY INSTITUTIONS

The idea of valuation, familiar to all of us in the buyings and sellings of every-day life, and to students in its elaboration as the science of political economy, has been extended beyond this field of tangible exchanges until we hear discussion of values with reference to almost any kind of human activity. Painters use the word in connection with light and color, moralists in questions of conduct, and so on. Any man or group of men, in any sphere of life, it appears, may be presumed to act according to a scale of values.

This broad use of the term seems to rest on the feeling that the judgment of worth is of much the same character, whether you apply it to a choice between a dozen eggs and a pound of beef in the market-place, or between shades of color or lines of conduct: it is a matter of ascertaining how much the alternatives appeal to you.

In short, a system of values is a system of practical ideas or motives to behavior, and the process of valuation by which we arrive at these ideas is presumably that same process of social and mental competition, selection and organization that we have all along been considering. Take a simple example: suppose I wish to drive a nail and have no hammer by me. I look at everything within reach with reference to its hammer-value, that is, with reference to its power to meet the special situation, and if the monkey-wrench promises more of this than any other object available, its value rises, it fits the situation, it is selected, it “works,” and becomes a more active factor in life. And it is by analogous processes that men, nations, doctrines, what you will, come to have various degrees and kinds of value.

It would seem that the essential things in the conception of value are three: an organism, a situation, and an object. The organism is necessary to give meaning to the idea; there must be worth to something. It need not be a person; a group, an institution, a doctrine, any organized form of life will do; and that it be conscious of the values that motivate it is not at all essential. Anything which lives and grows gives rise to a special system of values having reference to that growth, and these values are real powers in life, whether persons are aware of them or not; they are part of the character and tendency of the organism. The growth of language, for example, or of forms of art, is guided by valuations of which the people concerned in it commonly know nothing. The idea might easily be extended to animal and plant life, but I shall be content with some of its human applications.

The organism, whatever it may be, is the heart of the whole matter: we are interested primarily in that because it is a system of life, our system so long as we attend to it, and in the values because they function in that life. The situation is the immediate occasion for action, in view of which the organism integrates the various values working within it (as a man does when he “makes up his mind”) and meets the situation by an act of selection, which is a step in its own growth, leading on to new values and new situations. Valuation is only another name for tentative organic process.

The various classifications of value are based in one way or another on that of the objects, organisms, or situations which the general idea of value involves. Thus, taking the point of view of the object, we speak of grain-values, stock-values, the values of books, of pictures, of doctrines, of men. Evidently, however, these are indeterminate unless we bring in the organism and the situation to define them. A book has various kinds of value, as literary and pecuniary, and these again may be different for different persons or groups.

As regards the forms of human life to which values are to be referred, it seems to me of primary importance to make a distinction which I will call that between human-nature values and institutional values.

The first are those which may be traced without great difficulty to phases of universal human nature. The organism for which they have weight is simply man in those comparatively permanent aspects which we are accustomed to speak of as human nature, and to contrast with the shifting institutions that are built upon it. The objects possessing these values differ greatly from age to age, but the tests which are applied to them are fundamentally much the same, because the organism from which they spring is much the same. A bright color, a harmonious sound, have a worth for all men, and we may also reckon the more universal forms of beauty, those which men of any age and culture may appreciate through merely becoming familiar with them, as human-nature values.

Values of this kind are as various as human nature itself and may be differentiated and classified in a hundred ways. There are some in which particular senses are the conspicuous factors, as auditory and gustatory values. Others spring from the social sentiments, like the values of social self-feeling which underlie conformity, and those of love, fear, ambition, honor, and loyalty. Of much the same sort are the more universal religious and moral values, which, however, are usually entangled with institutional values of a more transient and special character. The same may be said of scientific, philosophical and ethical values, and lasting achievement in any of these fields depends mainly on the creation of values which are such for human nature, and not merely for some transient institutional point of view.

The second sort of values are those which must be ascribed to an institutional system of some sort. Human nature enters into them but is so transformed in its operation by the system that we regard the latter as their source, and are justified in doing so by the fact that social organisms have a growth and values that cannot, practically, be explained from the standpoint of general human nature. The distinction is obvious enough if we take a clear instance of it, like the distinction between religious and ecclesiastical values. Such general traits of religious psychology as are treated in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, give rise to values that we may call values of human nature; the values established in the Roman Catholic Church are a very different matter, though human nature certainly enters into them. In the same way there are special values for every sort of institutional development—legal values, political values, military values, university values, and so on. All technical values come under this head. Thus in every art there are not only human-nature values in the shape of phases of beauty open to men at large, but technical values, springing from the special history and methods of the art, which only the expert can appreciate.

This distinction, as I have remarked, rests upon the fact that there are forms of social life having a distinct organic growth, involving distinct needs and values, which cannot be understood by direct reference to universal human nature and the conditions that immediately influence it. I am aware that it may be difficult to make in particular cases. It resembles most psychological distinctions in offering no sharp dividing-line, being simply a question of the amount and definiteness of social tradition and structure involved. All human values are more or less mediated by special social conditions: they might, perhaps, be arranged in a scale as to the degree in which they are so mediated; some, like the taste for salt, hardly at all; others, like the taste for poetry, a great deal. In dealing with the latter kind we come to a point on the scale where the social antecedents take on such definite form and development as to constitute a distinct organism, which must be studied as such before we can understand the value situation. In moral values, for example, there are some, like those of loyalty, kindness, and courage, which spring quite directly from human-nature; others, like the obligation to go to church on Sunday, are evidently institutional.

I need hardly add that human and institutional values often conflict, or that reform consists largely in readjusting them to each other. Nor need I discuss in detail the familiar process by which human-nature values, seeking realization through a complex social system, are led to take on organization and an institutional character, which carries them far away from human nature and in time calls for a reassertion of the latter, through the initiative of individuals and small groups. Any one may see such cycles in the history of the Christian church, or of any other institution he may prefer to study.

The various human-nature and institutional values differ among themselves as the phases of the human mind itself differ: that is, however marked the differences, the values are after all expressions of a common organic life. There is no clean-cut separation among them and at times they merge indistinguishably one into another. An organic mental-social life has for one of its phases an organic system of values. For example, the æsthetic and moral values may seem quite unconnected, as in the case of a man with a “fair outside” but a bad character, and yet we feel that there is something beautiful about perfect goodness and something good about perfect beauty. It is agreed, I believe, that the best literature and art are moral, not, perhaps, by intention, but because the two kinds of value are related and tend to coincide in their completeness. Alongside of these we may put truth-value, and say of the three that they are phases of the highest form of human motive which often become indistinguishable.

The institutional values are also parts of this organic whole, and merge into the human-nature values, as I have suggested, so that it may be hard to distinguish between them. An institution, however, seldom or never corresponds so closely to a phase of human nature that the institutional values and the immediately human values on the whole coincide. An idea, in becoming institutional, adapts itself to the whole traditional structure of society, taking the past upon its shoulders, and loses much of the breadth and spontaneity of our more immediate life. There are no institutions that express adequately the inner need for beauty, truth, righteousness, and religion as human nature requires them at a given time: no church, for example, ever was or can be wholly Christian.

Because of this organic character, values vary with the time, the group, and the special situation. Every nation or epoch has its more or less peculiar value system, made up of related parts; any one can see that the system of the Middle Ages was very different from ours. Values are a part of the ethos, the mores, or whatever you choose to call the collective state of mind.^[63] Each individual, also, has a system of values of his own which is a differentiated member of the system of the group. And these various group and individual aspects hang together in such a way that no one aspect can be explained except by reference to the whole out of which it grows. You can hardly understand how a man feels about religion, for example, unless you understand also how he feels about his industrial position and about other matters in which he is deeply concerned; you must, so far as may be, grasp his life as a whole. And you will hardly do this unless you grasp also the social medium in which he lives. Any searching study of any sort of values must be the study of an organic social life.

It is apparent that the same object may have many kinds of value, perhaps all of those that I have mentioned. It is conceivable that man may turn all phases of his life toward an object and appraise it differently for each phase. Consider, for instance, an animal like the ox, of immemorial interest to the human race. It may be regarded as beautiful or ugly, may arouse the various emotions, as love, fear, or anger, may give rise to moral and philosophical questions, may be the object of religious feeling, as in India, and may have a value for the senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. It has also, especially among the pastoral peoples, notable institutional values; plays a large part in law, ceremony, and worship, and, in our own tradition, has an eponymous relation to pecuniary institutions.^[64]

The process that generates value is mental but not ordinarily conscious; it works by suggestion, influence, and the competition and survival of ideas; but all this is constantly going on in and through us without our knowing it. I may be wholly unaware of the genesis or even the existence of values which live in my mind and guide my daily course; indeed this is rather the rule than the exception. The common phrase, “I have come to feel differently about it,” expresses well enough the way in which values usually change. The psychology of the matter is intricate, involving the influence of repetition, of subtle associations of ideas, of the prestige of personalities, giving weight to their example, and the like; but of all this we commonly know nothing. The idea of punishment after death, for example, has been fading for a generation past; its value for conduct has mostly gone; yet few have been aware of its passing and fewer still can tell how this has come about. This trait of the growth of values is of course well understood in the art of advertising, which aims, first of all, to give an idea weight in the subconscious processes, to familiarize it by repetition, to accredit it by pleasing or imposing associations, to insinuate it somehow into the current of thought without giving choice a chance to pass upon it at all.

If the simpler phases of valuation, those that relate to the personal aims of the individual, are usually subconscious, much more is this true of the larger phases which relate to the development of complex impersonal wholes. It is quite true that there are “great social values whose motivating power directs the activities of nations, of great industries, of literary and artistic ‘schools,’ of churches and other social organizations, as well as the daily lives of every man and woman—impelling them in paths which no individual man foresaw or purposed.”^[65]

The institutions, we may note in this connection, usually have rather definite and precise methods for the appraisal of values in accordance with their own organic needs. In the state, for example, we have elaborate methods of electing or appointing persons, as well as legislative, judicial, and scientific authorities for passing upon ideas. The church has its tests of membership, its creeds, scriptures, sacraments, penances, hierarchy of saints and dignitaries, and the like, all of which serve as standards of value. The army has an analogous system. On the institutional side of art we have exhibitions with medals, prize competitions, election to academies and the verdict of trained critics: in science much the same, with more emphasis on titles and academic chairs. You will find something of the same sort in every well-organized traditional structure. We have it in the universities, not only in the official working of the institution, but in the fraternities, athletic associations, and the like.

It is also noteworthy that institutional valuation is nearly always the function of a special class. This is obviously the case with the institutions mentioned, and it is equally true, though perhaps less obviously, with pecuniary valuation.

A PHASE OF SOCIAL PROCESS—PECUNIARY VALUES INSTITUTIONAL—INADEQUATE IDEA OF VALUATION IN ECONOMIC TREATISES—INTERACTION BETWEEN THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE MARKET—ECONOMIC VALUES AN OUTCOME OF ECONOMIC HISTORY—THE FACTOR OF CLASS—INFLUENCE OF UPPER-CLASS IDEALS—POWER OF THE BUSINESS CLASS OVER VALUES

Pecuniary valuation is a phase of the general process of social thought, having its special methods and significance, but not peculiar in nature; the pecuniary estimates people set upon things are determined in a movement of suggestion and discussion, varying with the group and the time, like other phases of the public mind.

This is apparent a fortiori if we take what appear to be the simplest and most essential commodities. The estimation of wheaten bread as a necessity of life, that prevails with us, is a matter of opinion and custom; whether grounded in sound hygiene or not is irrelevant. Other countries and times have thought differently, and we know that foods may be regarded as necessary whose hygienic value is doubtful or negative, like beer in Germany or coffee with us. Consider in this connection the prepared foods known as cereals, for which vast sums are spent by all classes of our people; their vogue and value is clearly a matter of current, possibly transient, opinion, largely created by the psychological process of advertising.

I need hardly go further into this. It is plain that even among the most necessitous an existing scale of pecuniary values can be explained only as a product of the same social forces which create other phases of tradition and sentiment; and no one will expect anything different in values prevailing among a richer class. I do not mean, of course, that these forces work wholly in the air, but that, whatever physiological or mechanical factors there may be in demand and supply, these become active only through the mediation of a psychological process.

It is a common saying that values were formerly determined largely by custom, but that competition has supplanted the latter; and no doubt this is true in the sense that the stability of local custom is broken up. In a somewhat different way, however, custom—the influence of the past—is as great a factor in the market now as it ever was. Now as always it is the main source of the habits of thought that control demand and supply, and so value. An obvious case is that of funerals. Why is it that so large a part of the expenditure of the poor goes for this purpose, so large that a special branch of insurance is carried on to meet it? Evidently the reasons are historical, reaching back in fact to prehistoric society. And although this case appears exceptional, because this particular convention has lost most of its force among the educated classes, it is none the less true that we draw our values from the current of historical influence. What we are willing to spend money for, as individuals, as classes, as nations, can be understood only by a study of historical influences and of their interaction and propagation at the present time.

I have explained the distinction which I think should be made between human-nature values and institutional values, the latter being those which have social antecedents of so complicated a character that we cannot understand them except as the outcome of a special institutional development. It is apparent that the values of the pecuniary market fall under the latter head. Their immediate source is a social mechanism, whatever their indirect relation to human nature may be. You do not find them wherever man is found, but only where there is a somewhat developed system of exchange, a commodity recognized as money, and an active market.

Pecuniary values, however, are by no means all upon the same level as regards the degree in which they are institutional. All are so in the sense just indicated—that they require the mechanism of the market to define and develop them. But if we go back of this we find that some are based (so far as demand is concerned) upon rather simple human-nature values, in which the factors of special tradition and organization play no very great part. It is remarkable, when you come to think of it, how few such values there are; but those of meat and flour, of lumber, fuel, and the simpler kinds of clothing are relatively of this sort. Some, on the other hand, are the outgrowth of a complex institutional history through which it is difficult to trace the threads which connect them with the permanent needs of human nature. Such are the values of ornamental or ceremonial dress, of many of our foods, of our more elaborate houses and furniture, our amusements and dissipations, our books; and those connected with our systems of education, our churches, political institutions, and so on. The same difference runs through the values set on the services of different kinds of men. Why society should pay a substantial price for farmers and carpenters is obvious; but when you come to lawyers, stock-brokers, promoters, men of science, advertising men, and the like, not to speak of the holders of capital, who seem to be paid large sums for doing nothing at all, it is clear that the explanation is institutional, not to be reached without a study of the organic growth and interaction of social forms. And it seems clear also that values of this latter sort greatly and increasingly preponderate in our social system.

There is a fallacious kind of reasoning often met with in discussions of value, which consists in taking the simplest conceivable transactions, generally those of an imaginary primitive life, noticing the principles upon which they may have been based, and then assuming that the same principles suffice for a general explanation of the complex transactions of our own life. “It is the same thing now, only more intricate,” is the supposition. This, of course, overlooks the fact that even granting that such analyses are otherwise sound, which is very questionable, the social complexity is for many purposes the essential thing in the actual value process. It involves an institutional character, which changes with the social type, which may be understood only through a knowledge of institutional organisms, and which can be reformed only by working upon and through such organisms. The study of value-making institutions becomes, then, the principal means of arriving at practical truth.

The market (meaning by this the system of pecuniary transactions regarded as one organic whole) is as much an institution as the state or the church, which indeed it somewhat overshadows in modern life. I mean that it is a vast and complicated social system, rooted in the past, though grown enormously in recent times, wielding incalculable prestige, and, though manned by individuals like other institutions, by no means to be understood from a merely individual point of view. It would be as reasonable to attempt to explain the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, or the Institutes of Calvin, by the immediate working of religious instinct as to explain the market values of the present time by the immediate working of natural wants.

This is one of many points of view from which we may see the insufficiency of the usual treatment of the value-making process in treatises of political economy. This treatment starts with demand as a datum, assuming that each individual has made up his mind what he wants and how much he wants it. There is seldom, I believe, any serious attempt to go back of this, it being assumed, apparently, that these wants spring from the inscrutable depths of the private mind. At any rate it has not been customary to recognize that they are the expression of an institutional development. From most of the standard works the student would get the impression that if institutions and classes exist at all they have nothing to do with valuation.

The truth, I suppose, is that the idea of institutions, classes, and the like as organic forms or processes, having a significance and power not to be grasped from the standpoint of individuals or of general human nature, is alien to the philosophy underlying orthodox economics, and hence difficult of assimilation with orthodox theory. So far as such ideas are recognized they are, I should say, rather patched on, than woven into, the original stuff of the garment.^[66] Economists, however, are latterly becoming aware of the somewhat obsolete character of the philosophy involved in the orthodox tradition.^[67]

At any rate the result of the individualistic treatment of pecuniary value has been to saddle the whole institution—the market—upon human nature. Commercialism as we find it had to be explained, and as there was nothing else available poor human nature had to bear it. The simple formula, “The people want it, and the law of supply and demand does the rest,” will explain anything. But if we allow ourselves to ask why the people want it, or just who the people are that want it, or why they can make their wants effective, we discover that we have everything to learn. The accepted economic treatment would seem to be equivalent to a renunciation of any attempt to understand the relation of value to society at large; or, in other words, of any attempt to understand value itself, since to understand a thing is to perceive its more important relations. I do not deny that the method of analysis in question has its very important uses, but if it is allowed to be the only method it becomes the source of the gravest errors.

Just what does it mean, from the individual’s standpoint, when we say that the market, as a historical institution, is a main factor in values? Not merely that pre-existing individual estimates are summed up and equilibrated in accordance with the formulas of economic science, though this is one phase of the matter, but also that the individual estimates themselves are moulded by the market, at first in a general way and then, in the process of price-making, drawn toward a somewhat mechanical uniformity. The individual and the system act and react upon each other until, in most cases, they agree, somewhat as in fashion, in religious belief, and the like. The influence of the market is not secondary either in time or importance to that of the person; it is a continuous institution in which the individual lives and which is ever forming his ideas. The actual transactions are potent suggestions for new ones, and the actual transactions are the latest expressions of an institutional development in which class rule and a confused and one-sided commercialism have been chief factors. Thus the institution largely dictates the valuations which it afterward equilibrates.

To neglect this and treat demand and supply as a summation of original individual estimates involves an inadequacy of the same nature as there would be in explaining fashion as due to a summation of individual ideas about dress. The explanation would be true at a given instant, in fashion as in the market, but in the case of the former no one could fail to perceive how superficial, how delusive, it would be. This is obvious in the case of fashion because its changes are so rapid and conspicuous that we are compelled to notice them, and to see that the individual takes his ideas from the social current. The slower movement of ideas which determines our more stable wants is, however, of the same character, and the superficiality of treating it as originating in the individual is quite as great, amounting to no less than ignoring the historical factors in pecuniary value. The relation of the individual to the system is not essentially different in this case from what we may see in any institution. The ordinary man is a conformer; he lives in the institution and accepts its established valuations, though not without impressing some degree of individuality upon them. In this way we get our ideas and practices regarding religion, marriage, dress, and so on. So in pecuniary matters one accepts in a general way the current values but has a certain individuality in his choices which makes him to some extent a special factor in the market. There is no absolute conformity; we do everything a little differently from any one else; but this does not prevent our being controlled, in a broad way, by the prevailing institutions. This is what the usual economic analysis ignores, or perhaps omits as beyond its proper range.

Along with this we have the phenomenon of non-conformity. Individuals of special natural endowment, or unusual situation, or both, depart widely from the type, and initiate new tendencies which, under favorable conditions, may grow, and modify or destroy the old type. These new movements are likely to derive more directly from human nature than the old, and it is commonly true, though not always, that non-conformity represents human-nature values in conflict with those that are more institutional. We can see this process at the present time in the church, in politics, and in the family. It is taking place no less in pecuniary relations, and our expenditure is being humanized as radically, perhaps, as anything else. Things that seemed indispensable twenty-five years ago no longer seem worth while, and claims unthought of then have become irresistible. What changes have come over the budget of the household, of philanthropy, of the state and the church, during this period!

One might say much on this topic, but it would amount simply to an exposition, in this field, of the general relation between institutions and human nature.

Without taking into account this life of the individual in the institution we can never do justice to the general sway of the market, as a historical organism, over society at large. It is, as I have suggested, a structure as imposing as the political state itself, filling the eye with the spectacle of established and unquestioned power and impressing its estimates upon every mind.

We have to recognize, then, not merely that pecuniary value is, in general, a social value which derives from the social development of the past, but that it is the outcome, more particularly, of a special phase of that development, namely, the comparatively recent growth of industry and business, including also the growth of consumption. This is the special institution from which, for better or worse, the pecuniary values of to-day draw their character, very much as ecclesiastical values draw theirs from the history of the church. The phenomena of any institution are moulded in part by the general conditions of the time, but they are moulded especially by their particular institutional antecedents, which may be somewhat incongruous with the more general conditions. If you attend a service of the Established Church you become aware of points of view which may seem to you, as a man of to-day, absurd and incomprehensible, except as you know something of their history. The same may very well be true in the pecuniary world, though we may not notice it because we are more used to it, because we are ourselves members of this church.

And the method of criticism, in the market as in the church, is to take as large a view of the institution as possible, discover in what respects it is failing to function adequately in the general life, and strive to bring about such changes as seem to be required.

It seems probable that the more we consider, in the light of an organic view of society, the practice of discussing values apart from their institutional antecedents, the more sterile, except for somewhat narrowly technical purposes, this practice will appear. Certainly it should have but a secondary place in inquiries which seek to throw light upon ethics or social policy. It is, for example, but a frail basis for a theory of distribution. The latter I take to be essentially a historical and institutional phenomenon, economic technique being for the most part only a mechanism through which social organization expresses itself. I do not question the technical value of the current treatises on distribution which more or less cut it off from its roots in the social whole, but perhaps the time is coming for a treatment which takes technical economics for granted and elucidates the larger actualities of the question.

The principle that any social institution, and consequently any system of valuation, must be administered by a class, which will largely control its operation, is rather an obvious one. It was long overlooked, however, in political theory, at least in the theory of democracy, and is still overlooked, perhaps, in economic theory. At any rate it is a fact that pecuniary valuation is by no means the work of the whole people acting homogeneously, but is subject, very much like the analogous function in politics, to concentration in a class.

Class control is exercised mainly in two ways: through control or guidance of purchasing power, and so of the demand side of the market, and through the actual administration of the business system, which gives the class in possession command of the large personal (pecuniary) values incident to this function, and the opportunity to increase these by the use, direct and indirect, of their commanding position.^[68]

The process of definite pecuniary valuation, the price-making function, is based upon “effective demand” or the offer of money for goods; perhaps we ought to say for consumers’ goods, as the value of producers’ goods may be regarded as secondary.^[69] It is, therefore, the immediate work of those who have money to spend. Just how far spending is concentrated in a class I cannot pretend to say, but current estimates indicate that about one-fifth of the families in the United States absorb half the total income. No doubt, however, the proportion of saving in this fifth is somewhat greater, and that of spending somewhat less, than in the rest of the population.^[70] In this respect pecuniary value is, on the face of it, much more the work of a restricted class than political value, in determining which all voters are nominally equal. In either case, however, it would be most erroneous to suppose that value-making power can be measured in any such numerical way. There is always a psychological process of suggestion and discussion which works underneath the market transactions.

By virtue of this the power of the richer classes over values is far greater than that indicated by their relative expenditure. As people of leisure and presumptive refinement, they have prestige in forming those conventions by which expenditure is ruled. We see how cooks and shop-girls dress in imitation of society women, and how clerks mortgage their houses to buy automobiles. It is in fact notorious that the expenditure of the poor follows the fashions of the rich, unless in matters of the most direct and urgent necessity, and in no small degree even in these.

If what has just been said is sound it would be necessary, in order to understand contemporary values, to investigate, historically and psychologically, the ideals, such as they are, now prevalent in the richer classes.^[71] It might be found, perhaps, that these are largely of two sorts: ideals proper to commercialism—especially ideals of pecuniary power and of display as an evidence of it—and caste ideals taken over by the commercial aristocracy from an older order of society. Commercialism tends to fix attention rather on the acquisition than the use of wealth, and for ideals regarding the latter the successful class has fallen back upon the traditions, so well-knit and so attractive to the imagination, of a former hereditary aristocracy. We very inadequately realize, I imagine, how much our modes of thought, and hence our valuations, are dominated by English social ideals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We get these not only through the social prestige, continuous to our own day, of the English upper classes, but through history, literature, and art. Speaking roughly, the best European literature, and especially the best English literature, was produced under the dominance of an aristocratic class and is permeated with its ideals. Thus culture, even now, means in no small degree the absorption of these ideals.

They are, of course, in many respects high ideals, embracing conceptions of personal character, culture and conduct which it would be a calamity to lose; and yet these are interwoven with the postulate of an upper class, enjoying of right an enormous preponderance of wealth and power, and living in an affluence suitable to its appointed station. Thus it happens that as a man acquires wealth he feels that it is becoming that his family should assert its right of membership in the upper class by a style of living that shall proclaim his opulence. He also feels, if he has in any degree assimilated the finer part of the tradition, that a corresponding advance in culture would be becoming to him, but this is a thing by no means so readily purchased as material state; the general conditions are not favorable to it, and his efforts, if he makes any, are apt to be somewhat abortive.

Along with the preceding we have also a hopeful admixture of ideals which reflect the dawn of a truly democratic régime of life—ideals of the individual as existing for the whole, of power as justified only by public service, compunctions regarding the inequalities of wealth and opportunity, a lowly spirit in high places.

This sort of inquiry into the psychology of the upper class as a social organism—however unimportant these suggestions may be—appears to be indispensable if we are to form even an intelligent guess as to where we stand in the matter of valuation.

Coming now to the control over values incident to the administration of the business system, we note that the class in power, in spite of constant changes in its membership, is for many purposes a real historical organism acting collectively for its own aggrandizement. This collective action is for the most part unconscious, and comes about as the resultant of the striving of many individuals and small groups in the same general direction. We are all, especially in pecuniary matters, ready to join forces with those whose interest is parallel to our own: bankers unite to promote the banking interest, manufacturers form associations, and so on. The whole business world is a network of associations, formal and informal, which aim to further the pecuniary interest of the members. And while these groups, or members of the same group, are often in competition with one another, this does not prevent a general parallelism of effort as regards matters which concern the interest of the business class as a whole. The larger the group the less conscious, as a rule, is its co-operation, but it is not necessarily less effective and it can hardly be denied that the capitalist-manager class, or whatever we may call the class ascendant in business, acts powerfully as a body in maintaining and increasing its advantages over other classes. Nothing else can result from the desire of each to get and keep all he can, and to exchange aid with others similarly inclined.^[72]

When I say that the class is, for this purpose, a historical organism, I mean that its power, prestige, and methods come down from the past in a continuous development like other forms of social life. This would be the case even were individual membership in it quite free to every one in proportion to his ability, for an open class, as we can see, for instance, in the case of a priesthood, may yet be full of a spirit and power derived from the past.

In fact, however, membership in the upper economic class is by no means open to all in proportion to natural ability, and the command it enjoys of lucrative opportunities contributes greatly to its ascendancy. It controls the actual administration of the market much as the political party in power used to control the offices, with the influence and patronage pertaining to them—only the ascendancy in the economic world, based largely on inherited wealth and connections, is greater and more secure. The immediate effect of this is to enhance greatly the market value of the persons having access to the opportunities: they are enabled by their advantageous position to draw from the common store salaries, fees, and profits not at all explicable by natural ability alone. This effect is multiplied by the fact that limitation of the number of competitors gives an additional scarcity value to the services of the competent, which may raise their price almost incredibly. Thus it is well known that during the period of rapid consolidation of the great industries enormous fees, amounting in some cases to millions, were paid to those who effected the consolidations. It may be that their services were worth the price; but in so far as this is the fact it can be explained only as an exorbitant scarcity value due to limitation of opportunity. No one will contend, I suppose, that the native ability required was of so transcendent a character as to get such a reward under open conditions. Evidently of the thousands who might have been competent to the service only a few were on hand with such training and connections as to make them actual competitors. And the same principle is quite generally required to explain the relatively large incomes of the class in power, including those of the more lucrative professions. They represent the value of good natural ability multiplied by opportunity factors.^[73]

The fact usually urged in this connection, that these lucrative opportunities often fall to those who were not born in the upper class but have made their way into it by their own energy, is not very much to the point. It is not contended that our upper class is a closed caste, nor does it have to be in order to act as a whole, or to exercise a dominating and somewhat monopolistic influence over values. Though ill defined, not undemocratic in sentiment, and partly free from the hereditary character of European upper classes, it is yet a true historical successor of the latter, and dominates the weaker classes in much the same way as stronger classes have always done. Power is concentrated about the functions of the dominant institutions, and the powerful class use it, consciously or otherwise, for their individual and class advantage. Surely one has only to open his eyes to see this. I doubt whether there is a city, village, or township in the country where there is not a group of men who constitute an upper class in this sense. There is, it seems to me, a growing feeling that class, which the prevalent economics has relegated to oblivion under some such category as “imperfect freedom of competition,” is in fact at the very heart of our problem.

It appears, then, that pecuniary valuation is a social institution no less than the state or the church, and that its development must be studied not only on the impersonal side but also in the traditions and organization of the class that chiefly administers it.

THE SPECIAL FUNCTION OF MONEY VALUATION—PECUNIARY VALUES NOT NECESSARILY OF A LOWER SORT—THEY ARE FORMED, HOWEVER, BY A SPECIAL INSTITUTION—AND PERPETUATE HISTORIC WRONG—THEY HAVE ONLY A LIMITED CONTROL OF SOCIAL LIFE—MONEY REWARD VERSUS SELF-EXPRESSION—WE NEED TO EXTEND THE SPHERE OF MONEY VALUES

It seems that the distinctive function of money valuation is to generalize or assimilate values through a common measure. In this way it gives them reach and flexibility, so that many sorts of value are enabled to work freely together throughout the social system, instead of being confined to a small province. And since values represent the powers of society, the result is that these powers are organized in a large way and enabled to co-operate in a vital whole. Any market value that I, for instance, may control ceases to be merely local in its application and becomes a generalized force that I can apply anywhere. If I can earn a thousand dollars teaching bacteriology, I can take the money and go to Europe, exchanging my recondite knowledge for the services, say, of guides in the Alps, who never heard of bacteriology. Other values are similarly generalized and the result is a mobility that enables many sorts of value, reduced to a common measure, to be applied anywhere and anyhow that the holder may think desirable.

We have, then, to do with a value institution or process, far transcending in reach any special sort of value, and participating in the most diverse phases of our life. Its function resembles that of language, and its ideal may be said to be to do for value what language does for thought—furnish a universal medium of communicative growth. And just as language and the social organization based upon it are extended in their scope by the modern devices of cheap printing, mails, telegraphy, telephones, and the like, so the function of pecuniary valuation is extended by uniform money and by devices for credit and transfer, until the natural obstacles of distance, lack of knowledge, and lack of homogeneity are largely overcome.

This mobilization of values through the pecuniary measure tends to make the latter an expression of the total life of society, so far as the values that stand for this life have actually become mobilized or translated into pecuniary terms. Although this translation is in fact only partial and, as I have tried to show, institutional, still the wide scope of pecuniary value, along with its precision, gives it a certain title to its popular acceptance as value in a sense that no other kind of value can claim.

This also gives it that place as a regulator of social activity which economists have always claimed for it. Pecuniary value provides a motive to serve the pecuniary organism, a motive that penetrates everywhere, acts automatically, and adjusts itself delicately to the conditions of demand and supply. If more oranges are wanted in New York, a higher price is offered for them in California and Sicily; if more dentists are needed, the rewards of the profession increase and young men are attracted into it. Thus there is everywhere an inducement to supply those goods and services which the buying power in society thinks it wants, and this inducement largely guides production. At each point of deficient supply a sort of suction is set up to draw available persons and materials to that point and set them to work.

Thus our life, in one of its main aspects, is organized through this central value institution or market, very much as in other aspects it is organized through language, the state, the church, or the family.

It will be well to consider here the view that the sphere of pecuniary value, however wide, is yet distinctly circumscribed and confined to a special and, on the whole, inferior province of life. According to this view only the coarser and more material values can be measured in money, while the finer sorts, as of beauty, friendship, righteousness, and so on, are in their nature private and untranslatable, and so out of the reach of any generalizing process.

It seems doubtful whether we can admit that there is any such clear circumscription of the pecuniary field. All values are interrelated, and it may reasonably be held that none can stand apart and be wholly incommensurable with the others. The idea of a common measure which, for certain purposes at least, may be applied to all values is by no means absurd. The argument that such a measure is possible may be stated somewhat as follows.

Since the function of values is to guide conduct, they are in their nature comparable. Conduct is a matter of the total or synthetic behavior of a living whole in view of a situation: it implies the integration of all the motives bearing on the situation. Accordingly when a crisis in conduct arises the values relating to it, no matter how incommensurable they may seem, are in some way brought to a common measure, weighed against one another, in order to determine which way the scale inclines. This commensuration is psychical, not numerical, and we are far from understanding its exact nature, but unless each pertinent kind of value has a part in it of some sort it would seem that the mind is not acting as a vital whole. If there were absolute values that cannot be impaired or in any way influenced by the opposing action of other values, they must apparently exist in separate compartments and not in organic relation to the rest of the mind. It does not follow that what we regard as a high motive, such as the sense of honor, must necessarily be overcome by a sufficient accumulation of lower motives, such as sensuous desires, but we may be prepared to find that if the two are opposed the latter will, in one way or another, modify the conduct required by the former, and this I believe is usually the fact. Thus suppose a lower value, in the shape of temptation, is warring against a higher in the shape of an ideal. Even if we concede nothing to the former, even if we react far away from it, none the less it has entered into our life and helped to mould it—as sensuality, for example, helps to mould the ascetic.

And this weighing of one kind of value against another will take place largely in terms of money, which exists for the very purpose of facilitating such transactions. Thus honor is one of those values which many would place outside the pecuniary sphere, and yet honor may call for the saving of money to pay a debt, while sensuality would spend it for a hearty dinner. In this case, then, we buy our honor with money, or we sell it, through money, for something lower. In much the same way are the larger choices of society, as, for example, between power devoted to education and power devoted to warships, expressed in pecuniary terms. In general we do, in fact, individually and collectively, weigh such things as friendship, righteousness, and beauty against other matters, and in terms of money. Beauty is on the market, however undervalued, in the form, for example, of music, art, literature, flowers, and dwelling-sites. A friendly personality has a market value in salesmen, doctors, writers, and teachers; indeed in all occupations where ability to influence persons is important—and there are few in which it is not. I notice that if there is anything attractive about a man he soon learns to collect pay for it. And not less is it true that the need for righteousness finds expression in a willingness to pay a (reasonable) price for it in the market-place. Convincing preachers and competent social workers command salaries, and great sums go to beneficent institutions.

The truth is that the values we think of as absolute are only, if I may use the expression, relatively absolute. That is, they so far transcend the values of every-day traffic that we think of them as belonging to a wholly different order, but experience shows that they do not. Life itself is not an absolute value, since we constantly see it sacrificed to other ends; chastity is sold daily by people not radically different in nature from the rest of us, and as for honor it would be hard to imagine a kind which might not, in conceivable situations, be renounced for some other and perhaps higher aim. The idea of the baseness of weighing the higher sort of values in the same scale with money rests on the assumption that the money is to be used to purchase values of a lower sort; but if it is the indispensable means to still higher values we shall justify the transaction. Such exchanges are constantly taking place: only those who are protected by pecuniary affluence can imagine otherwise. The health of mothers is sacrificed for money to support their children, and the social opportunities of sisters given up to send brothers to college. In the well-to-do classes, at least, the life of possible children is often renounced on grounds of expense.

There are, no doubt, individuals who have set their hearts on particular things for which they will sacrifice without consideration almost anything else. These may be high things, like love, justice, and honor; they are often ignoble things, like avarice or selfish ambition. And, in a similar way, nations or institutions sometimes cherish values which are almost absolute, like those of national independence, or the authority of the Pope. But in general we may say that if X and Y be among our most cherished objects, then situations may occur where, through the medium of money, some sacrifice of X will be made for the sake of Y.

I conclude, then, that it is impossible to mark off sharply the pecuniary sphere from that of other kinds of value. It is always possible that the highest as well as the lowest things may be brought within its scope.

And yet we all feel that the pecuniary sphere has limitations. The character of these may be understood, I think, by recurring to the idea that the market is a special institution in much the same sense that the church is or the state. It has a somewhat distinct system of its own in society at large much as it has in the mind of each individual. Our buyings and sellings and savings, our pecuniary schemes and standards, make in some degree a special tract of thought that often seems unconnected with other tracts. Yet we constantly have to bring the ideas of this tract into relation with those outside it; and likewise in society the pecuniary institution is in constant interaction with other institutions, this interaction frequently taking the form of a translation of values. In general the social process is an organic whole somewhat clearly differentiated into special systems, of which the pecuniary is one.

There are many histories that fall mainly within this system and must be studied chiefly from the pecuniary point of view, not forgetting, however, that no social history is really understood until it is seen in its place as a phase of the general process. The histories I mean are those that have always been regarded as the peculiar business of the economist: the course of wheat from the grain-field to the breakfast-table, or of iron from the mine to the watch-spring, the growth of the social organizations created for purposes of manufacture, trade, banking, finance, and so on. There are other histories, like those of books, educational institutions, religious faith, scientific research, and the like, which must be understood chiefly from other points of view, although they are never outside the reach of pecuniary relations.

To say, then, that almost any kind of value may at times be measured in pecuniary terms is by no means to say that the latter are a universal and adequate expression of human nature and of society. On the contrary, pecuniary value is, in the main, a specialized type of value, generated within a specialized channel of the social process, and having decided limitations corresponding to this fact. I shall try to indicate a little more closely what some of these limitations are.

Let us notice, in the first place, that the pecuniary values of to-day derive from the whole past of the pecuniary system, so that all the wrongs that may have worked themselves into that system are implicit in them. If a materialized ruling class is in the saddle, this fact will be expressed in the large incomes of this class and their control not only of the mechanism of the market but, through prestige, of the demand which underlies its values. If drink, child labor, prostitution, and corrupt politics are part of the institution, they will be demanded upon the market as urgently as anything else. Evidently it would be fatuous to assume that the market process expresses the good of society. The demand on which it is based is a turbid current coming down from the past and bearing with it, for better or worse, the outcome of history. All the evils of commercialism are present in it, and are transmitted through demand to production and distribution. To accept this stream as pure and to reform only the mechanism of distribution would be as if a city drawing its drinking-water from a polluted river should expect to escape typhoid by using clean pipes. We have reason, both in theory and in observation, to expect that our pecuniary tradition, and the values which express it, will need reform quite as much as anything else.

Indeed we cannot expect, do what we may to reform it, that the market can ever become an adequate expression of ideal values. It is an institution, and institutional values, in their nature, are conservative, representing the achieved and established powers of society rather than those which are young and look to the future. The slow crystallization of historical tendencies in institutions is likely at the best to lag behind our ideals and cannot be expected to set the pace of progress.

Suppose, however, we assume for the time being that demand does represent the good of society, and inquire next how far the market process may be trusted to realize this good through the pecuniary motive.

It seems clear that this motive can serve as an effective guide only in the case of deliberate production, for the sake of gain, and with ownership in the product. The production must be deliberate in order that any rational motive may control it, and the pecuniary motive will not control it unless it is for the sake of gain and protected by ownership. These limitations exclude such vast provinces of life that we may well wonder at the extent of our trust in the market process.

They shut out the whole matter of the production and development of men, of human and social life; that is, they indicate that however important the pecuniary process may be in this field it can never be trusted to control it, not even the economic side of it. This is a sphere in which the market must be dominated by other kinds of organization.

If we take the two underlying factors, heredity and environment, as these mould the life of men, we see that we cannot look to the market to regulate the hereditary factor as regards either the total number of children to be born, or the stocks from which they are to be drawn. I know that there are men who still imagine that “natural selection,” working through economic competition, operates effectively in this field, but I doubt whether any one knows facts upon which such a view can reasonably be based. In what regards population and eugenics it is more and more apparent that rational control and selection, working largely outside the market process, are indispensable.

The same may be said of the whole action of environment in forming persons after birth, including the family, the community, the school, the state, the church, and the unorganized working of suggestion and example. None of these formative agencies is of a nature to be guided adequately by pecuniary demand. The latter, even if its requirements be high, offers no guarantee that men will be produced in accordance with these requirements, since it does not control the course of their development.

Let us observe, however, that even in this field the market may afford essential guidance to other agencies of control. If, for example, certain kinds of work do not yield a living wage, this may be because the supply of this kind of work is in excess, and the state or some other organization may proceed on this hint to adjust supply to demand by vocational training and guidance. Or the method of reform may be to put restrictions upon demand, as in the case of the minimum wage. Although the market process is inadequate alone, it will usually have some share in any plan of betterment.

Personal and social development must, in general, be sought through rational organization having a far wider scope than the market, though co-operating with that in every helpful way, and including, perhaps, radical reforms in the pecuniary system itself. It would be hard to formulate a principle more fallacious and harmful than the doctrine that the latter is an adequate regulator of human life, or that its own processes are superior to regulation. We are beginning to see that the prevalence of such ideas has given us over to an unhuman commercialism.

What I have been saying of persons and personal development applies also to natural resources and public improvements, to arts, sciences, and the finer human values in general. All these have a pecuniary aspect, of more or less importance, but a money demand alone cannot beget or control them. Love, beauty, and righteousness may come on the market under certain conditions, but they are not, in the full sense, market commodities. Our faith in money is exemplified in these days by the offer of money prizes for poetry, invention, the promotion of peace, and for heroic deeds. I would not deprecate such offers, whose aim is excellent and sometimes attains the mark. They are creditable to their authors and diffuse a good spirit even though the method is too naïve to be very effectual. If money is greatly to increase products of this kind it must be applied, fundamentally and with all possible wisdom, to the conditions that mould character.

These higher goods do not really come within the economic sphere. They touch it only incidentally, their genesis and interaction belonging mainly to a different kind of process, one in which ownership and material exchange play a secondary part. The distinctively economic commodities and values are those whose whole course of production is one in which the factors are subject to legal ownership and controlled by a money-seeking intelligence, so that the process is essentially pecuniary. Thus we may say that ordinary typewriting is economic, because it is a simple, standard service which is supplied in any quantity according to demand. The work of a newspaper reporter is not quite so clearly economic, because not so definitely standardized and affording more room for intangible merits which pay cannot insure. And when we come to magazine literature of the better sort we are in a field where the process is for the most part non-pecuniary, depending, that is, on an interplay of minds outside the market, the latter coming in only to set its very questionable appraisal on the product. As to literature in general, art, science, and religion, no one at all conversant with the history of these things will claim that important work in them has any close relation to pecuniary inducement. The question whether the great man was rich and honored, like Rubens, or worked in poverty and neglect, like Rembrandt in his later years, is of only incidental interest in tracing the history of such achievement. The ideals and disciplines which give birth to it are generated in non-pecuniary tracts of thought and intercourse, and unless genius actually starves, as it sometimes does, it fulfils its aim without much regard to pay. I need hardly add that good judges have always held that a moderate poverty was a condition favorable to intellectual and spiritual achievement.

I would assign a very large and growing sphere to pecuniary valuation, but we cannot be too clear in affirming that even at its best and largest it can never be an adequate basis for general social organization. It is an institution, like another, having important functions but requiring, like all institutions, to be brought under rational control by the aid of a comprehensive sociology, ethics, and politics. It has no charter of autonomy, no right to exemption from social control.

Thus even if market values were the best possible of their kind, we could not commit the social system to their charge, and still less can we do so when the value institution, owing to rapid and one-sided growth, is in a somewhat confused and demoralized condition. Bearing with it not only the general inheritance of human imperfection but also the special sins of a narrow and somewhat inhuman commercialism, it by no means reflects life in that broad way in which a market, with all its limitations, might reflect it. The higher values remain for the most part untranslated, even though translatable, and the material and technical aspects of the process have acquired an undue ascendancy. In general this institution, like others that might be named, is in such a condition that its estimates are no trustworthy expression of the public mind.

Having in mind these general limitations upon the sphere of pecuniary value, let us consider it more particularly as a motive to stimulate and guide the work of the individual. For this purpose we may distinguish it broadly from the need of self-expression, using the latter comprehensively to include all other influences that urge one to productive work. Among these would be emulation and ambition, the need of activity for its own sake, the love of workmanship and creation, the impulse to assert one’s individuality, and the desire to serve the social whole. Such motives enter intimately into one’s self-consciousness and may, for our present purpose, be included under the need of self-expression.

It is true that the pecuniary motive may also be, indirectly, a motive of self-expression; that is, for example, a girl may work hard for ten dollars with which to buy a pretty hat. It makes a great difference, however, whether or not the work is directly self-expressive, whether the worker feels that what he does is joyous and rewarding in itself, so that it would be worth doing whether he were paid for it or not. The artist, the poet, the skilled craftsman in wood and iron, the born teacher or lawyer, all have this feeling, and it is desirable that it should become as common as possible. I admit that the line is not a sharp one, but on the whole the pecuniary motive may be said to be an extrinsic one, as compared with the more intrinsic character of those others which I have called motives of self-expression.

When I say that self-expression is a regulator of productive activity I mean that, like the pecuniary motive, though in a different way, it is the expression of an organic whole, and not necessarily a less authoritative expression. What a man feels to be self-expressive springs in part from the instincts of human nature and in part from the form given to those instincts by the social life in which his mind develops. Both of these influences spring from the organic life of the human race. The man of genius who opens new ways in poetry and art, the social reformer who spends his life in conflict with inhuman conditions, the individual anywhere or of any sort who tries to realize the needs of his higher being, represents the common life of man in a way that may have a stronger claim than the requirements of pecuniary demand. As a motive it is quite as universal as the latter, and there is no one of us who has not the capacity to feel it.

As regards the individual himself, self-expression is simply the deepest need of his nature. It is required for self-respect and integrity of character, and there can be no question more fundamental than that of so ordering life that the mass of men may have a chance to find self-expression in their principal activity.

These two motives are related much as are our old friends conformity and individuality; we have to do in fact with a phase of the same antithesis. Pecuniary valuation, like conformity, furnishes a somewhat mechanical and external rule: it represents the social organization in its more explicit and established phases, and especially, of course, the pecuniary institution, which has a life somewhat distinct from that of other phases of the establishment. It is based on those powers in society which are readily translated into pecuniary terms, on wealth, position, established industrial and business methods, and so on. Self-expression springs from the deeper and more obscure currents of life, from subconscious, unmechanized forces which are potent without our understanding why. It represents humanity more immediately and its values are, or may be, more vital and significant than those of the market; we may look to them for art, for science, for religion, for moral improvement, for all the fresher impulses to social progress. The onward things of life usually come from men whose imperious self-expression disregards the pecuniary market. In humbler tasks self-expression is required to give the individual an immediate and lively interest in his work; it is the motive of art and joy, the spring of all vital achievement.

It is quite possible that these motives should work harmoniously together; indeed they do so in no small proportion of cases. A man who works because he wants money comes, under favorable conditions, to take pleasure and pride in what he does. Or he takes up a certain sort of work because he likes it, and finds that his zeal helps him to pecuniary success. I suppose that there are few of us with whom the desire of self-expression would alone be sufficient to incite regular production. Most of us need a spur to do even that which we enjoy doing, or at any rate to do it systematically. We are compelled to do something and many of us are fortunate enough to find something that is self-expressive.

The market, it would seem, should put a gentle pressure upon men to produce in certain directions, spurring the lazy and turning the undecided into available lines of work. Those who have a clear inner call should resist this pressure, as they always have done, and always must if we are to have progress. This conflict between the pecuniary system and the bias of the individual, though in some sort inevitable, should not be harsh or destructive. The system should be as tolerant and hospitable as its institutional nature permits. Values, like public opinion to which they are so closely related, should be constantly awakened, enlightened, enlarged, and made to embrace new sorts of personal merit. There is nothing of more public value than the higher sort of self-expression, and this should be elicited and rewarded in every practicable way. It is possible to have institutions which are not only tolerant but which, in a measure, anticipate and welcome useful kinds of non-conformity.

Pecuniary valuation, represented by the offer of wages, will never produce good work nor a contented people until it is allied with such conditions that a man feels that his task is in some sense his, and can put himself heartily into it. This means some sort of industrial democracy—control of working conditions by the state or by unions, co-operation, socialism—something that shall give the individual a human share in the industrial whole of which he is a member.

Closely related to this is the sense of worthy service. No man can feel that his work is self-expressive unless he believes that it is good work and can see that it serves mankind. If the product is trivial or base he can hardly respect himself, and the demand for such things, as Ruskin used to say, is a demand for slavery. Or if the employer for whom a man works and who is the immediate beneficiary of his labors is believed to be self-seeking beyond what is held legitimate, and not working honorably for the general good, the effect will be much the same. The worst sufferers from such employers are the men who work for them, whether their wages be high or low.

As regards the general relation in our time between market value and self-expression, the fact seems to be something as follows: Our industrial system has undergone an enormous expansion and an almost total change of character. In the course of this, human nature has been dragged along, as it were, by the hair of the head. It has been led or driven into kinds of work and conditions of work that are repugnant to it, especially repugnant in view of the growth of intelligence and of democracy in other spheres of life. The agent in this has been the pecuniary motive backed by the absence of alternatives. This pecuniary motive has reflected a system of values determined under the ascendancy, direct and indirect, of the commercial class naturally dominant in a time of this kind. I will not say that as a result of this state of things the condition of the hand-workers is worse than in a former epoch; in some respects it seems worse, in many it is clearly better; but certainly it is far from what it should be in view of the enormous growth of human resources.

In the economic philosophy which has prevailed along with this expansion, the pecuniary motive has been accepted as the legitimate principle of industrial organization to the neglect of self-expression. The human self, however, is not to be treated thus with impunity; it is asserting itself in a somewhat general discontent and in many specific forms of organized endeavor. The commercialism that accepts as satisfactory present values and the method of establishing them is clearly on the decline and we have begun to work for a more self-expressive order.

Notwithstanding the insufficiencies of pecuniary valuation, the character of modern life seems to call for an extension of its scope: it would appear to be true, in a certain sense, that the principle that everything has its price should be rather enlarged than restricted. The ever-vaster and more interdependent system in which we live requires for its organization a corresponding value mechanism, just as it requires a mechanism of transportation and communication. And this means not only that the value medium should be uniform, adaptable, and stable, but also that the widest possible range of values should be convertible into it. The wider the range the more fully does the market come to express and energize the aims of society. It is a potent agent, and the more good work we can get it to take hold of the better. Its limitations, then, by no means justify us in assuming that it has nothing to do with ideals or morals. On the contrary, the method of progress in every sphere is to transfuse the higher values into the working institutions and keep the latter on the rise. Just as the law exists to formulate and enforce certain phases of righteousness, and is continually undergoing criticism and revision based on moral judgments, so ought every institution, and especially the pecuniary system, to have constant renewal from above. It should be ever in process of moral regeneration, and the method that separates it from the ethical sphere, while justifiable perhaps for certain technical inquiries, becomes harmful when given a wider scope. As regards responsibility to moral requirements there is no fundamental difference between pecuniary valuation and the state, the church, education, or any other institution. We cannot expect to make our money values ideal, any more than our laws, our sermons, or our academic lectures, but we can make them better, and this is done by bringing higher values upon the market.

To put it otherwise, the fact that pecuniary values fail to express the higher life of society creates a moral problem which may be met in either of two ways. One is to depreciate money valuation altogether and attempt to destroy its prestige. The other is to concede to it a very large place in life, even larger, perhaps, than it occupies at present, and to endeavor to regenerate it by the translation into it of the higher values. The former way is analogous with that somewhat obsolete form of religion which gave up this world to the devil and centred all effort on keeping out of it, in preparation for a wholly different world to be gained after death. The world and the flesh, which could not really be escaped, were left to a neglected and riotous growth.

In like manner, perceiving that pecuniary values give in many respects a debasing reflection of life, we are tempted to rule them out of the ethical field and consign them to an inferior province. The price of a thing, we say, is a material matter which has nothing to do with its higher values, and never can have. This, however, is bad philosophy, in economics as in religion. The pecuniary values are members of the same general system as the moral and æsthetic values, and it is part of their function to put the latter upon the market. To separate them is to cripple both, and to cripple life itself by cutting off the healthy interchange among its members. Our line of progress lies, in part at least, not over commercialism but through it; the dollar is to be reformed rather than suppressed. Our system of production and exchange is a very great achievement, not more on the mechanical side than in the social possibilities latent in it. Our next task seems to be to fulfil these possibilities, to enlarge and humanize the system by bringing it under the guidance of a comprehensive social and ethical policy.

VALUES EXPRESS ORGANIZATION—DIFFERENT KINDS OF VALUE, HOW RELATED—ALL KINDS ARE MENTALLY COMMENSURABLE—PECUNIARY VALUES SHOULD APPARENTLY EXPRESS ALL OTHERS, BUT DO SO IMPERFECTLY—THEY ARE MOULDED BY A SPECIAL INSTITUTIONAL PROCESS—CLASS AGAIN—ORGANIZED RECOGNITION AND COMPETITION—CONDITIONS OF PROGRESS IN MARKET VALUES—PROGRESS-VALUES—EXAMPLES OF UNPROGRESSIVE VALUES—NEED OF SOCIAL GROUPS AND DISCIPLINES—INSTANCES OF PROGRESS—PROGRESS IN THE PECUNIARY VALUATION OF MEN

To make clear what I mean by progress in pecuniary valuation, let me recall something of the nature of values in general and of the relation of the various kinds to one another.

Value is an expression of organization. The power of an object to influence a man, or any other form of life, depends upon the established tendencies of that form of life, and, accordingly, wherever we find a system of values there is always a mental or social organization of some kind corresponding to it. Thus in the simpler provinces of the mind there are taste-values, touch-values, and smell-values, corresponding to our physiological organization. In a higher sphere we have intellectual and feeling values of many kinds, shown in our differential conduct as regards persons, books, pictures, theories, or other influencing objects, and indicating organized habits of thought and sentiment. So in the larger or societal phase of life we see that each organized tendency, the prevailing fashion, the dominant church or state, a school of literature or painting, the general spirit of an epoch, involves a corresponding system of values. You prefer Monet to David, or the German view of the war to the English view, or the present style of dress to hoop-skirts, because you are in one or another of these tendencies.

There are many ways of classifying values. In general, the kinds are innumerable and their relations intricate: taken as a whole they express the diversity and complex interdependence of life itself.

The question as to what are the differences among the various sorts of value, as moral, æsthetic, legal, religious, or economic, is answered, in general, by saying that they express differentiated phases of the social system. If the phase is definitely organized we can usually ascertain and distinguish the kind of value in question with corresponding definiteness; if not, the values remain somewhat indeterminate, though not necessarily lacking in power. Thus legal value is a fairly definite thing, because there is a definite institution corresponding to it and declaring it from time to time through courts, legislatures, text-book writers, and the like. How you must draw your will to make it legally valid is something a lawyer should be able to tell you with precision. Economic values—if we understand economic to mean pecuniary—are definite within the range of an active market. If religious values mean ecclesiastical, they are easily distinguished; but if they refer to the inclinations of the religious side of human nature, they are not readily ascertained, because there is no definite organization corresponding to them—or if there is, in the nature of the mind, we know little about it. The values that are most potent over conduct, among which the religious are to be reckoned, are often the least definable. A psychologist, however, like the late William James, who wrote a book on the human-nature aspect of religion, may succeed in defining them more closely. Much the same may be said of moral and æsthetic values. In the large human-nature sense, apart from particular ethical conventions or schools of art, they are of the utmost interest and moment, indeed, but do not lend themselves to precise ascertainment.

And all of these distinctions among kinds of value, whether definite or not, are conditioned by the fact that the various kinds are, after all, differentiated phases of a common life. It is natural that they should overlap, that they should be largely aspects rather than separate things. Values are motives; and we all know that the classification of a man’s motives as economic, ethical, or æsthetic is somewhat formal and arbitrary. The value to me of an engraving I have just bought may be æsthetic, or economic, or perhaps ostentatious, or ethical. (We see in Ruskin’s writings how easily an æsthetic value becomes ethical if one takes it seriously.) It may well be all these: my impulse to cherish it is a whole with various aspects.

In much the same way society at large has its various institutions and tendencies, expressing themselves in values, which are more or less distinct but whose operation you cannot wholly separate in a given case. The distinctions among them are in the nature of organic differentiations within a whole.

Observe, next, that there is a sort of commensurability throughout the world of values, multifarious as it is. I mean that in a vague but real way we are accustomed to weigh one kind of value against another and to guide our conduct by the decision. Apart from any definite medium of exchange there is a system of mental barter, as you might call it, in universal operation, by which values are compared definitely enough to make choice possible. You may say that the things that appeal to us are often so different in kind that it is absurd to talk of comparing them; but as a matter of fact we do it none the less. We choose between the satisfaction of meeting a friend at the station and that of having our dinner at the usual time, between spending an hour of æsthetic improvement at the Metropolitan Museum and one of humanitarian expansion at the University Settlement, between gratifying our sense of honor by returning an excess of change and our greed by keeping it, between the social approbation to be won by correct dress and bearing and the physical ease of slouchiness. Almost any sort of value may come, in practice, to be weighed against almost any other sort.

Indeed this is implied in the very conception of value as that which has weight or worth in guiding behavior. Our behavior is a kind of synthesis of the ideas, or values, that are working in us in face of a given situation, and these may be any mixture that life supplies. The result is that almost any sort of value may find itself mixed up and synthetized with any other sort.

But the human mind, ever developing its instruments, has come to supplement this psychical barter of values by something more precise, communicable and uniform, and so we arrive at pecuniary valuation. This is in some respects analogous to language, serving for organization and growth through more exact communication; and just as language develops a system of words, of means of record (writing, printing, and the like), also of schools, and, withal, a literary and learned class to have special charge of the institution, so pecuniary valuation has its money, banks, markets, and its business class.

For our present purpose of discussing the general relation of pecuniary to other values, as æsthetic or ethical, it is of no great importance, I should say, to inquire minutely into the various kinds of the latter or their precise relations to one another. The large fact to bear in mind, in this connection, is that we have, on the one hand, a world of psychical values, whose reality is shown in their power to influence conduct, and, on the other, a world of prices, which apparently exists to give all kinds of psychical value general validity and exact expression, but which seems to do this in a partial and inadequate manner.

This, indeed, may be called the root of the whole matter: the fact that pecuniary value, whose functions of extension, of precision, of motivation, of organization, are so essential and should be so beneficent, appears in practice to ignore or depreciate many kinds of value, and these often the highest, by withholding pecuniary recognition; and, on the other hand, to create or exaggerate values which seem to have little or no human merit to justify such appraisal. Let us, then, inquire why its interpretation of life is so warped.

The answer to this I take to be, in general, that pecuniary valuation is achieved through an institutional process, and, like all things, bears the marks of its genesis. There are institutional conditions that intervene between psychical values and their pecuniary expression. These are, roughly, of two sorts, those that operate after pecuniary demand is formed, within the processes of exchange, and those that operate antecedently to the actual demand, in the larger social process. The former are technical conditions within the economic organization, and are studied by political economists; the latter spring from the social organization as a whole, and are usually regarded as outside the province of economics.

I may illustrate these two sorts of conditions by considering the pecuniary value of a work of art. Thus if a sculptor cannot sell his product for a price commensurate with its merit, this may be because, owing to lack of information, he has not come into touch with the market, although the market may be a good one. He has not found the group of buyers willing to pay what his work is worth. On the other hand, it may be because, owing to social conditions involving a low state of taste, there is no such group.

The former phase of the matter, since it lies within the familiar provinces of economics, I need not say much about. We all know that the processes of competition and exchange do not correspond to the economic ideal; that they are impaired by immobility, ignorance, monopoly, lack of intelligent organization, and other well-known defects. How serious these are, on the whole, I need not now inquire, but will pass on to those considerations that go behind pecuniary demand, and indicate why this is itself no trustworthy expression of the human values actually working in the minds of men at a given time.

Most conspicuous among them, perhaps, is the factor of class. The pecuniary market taken as a whole, with its elaborate system of money, credit, bargaining, accounting, forecasting of demand, business administration, and so on, involving numerous recondite functions, requires the existence of a technical class, which stands in the same relation to the pecuniary institution as the clergy, politicians, lawyers, doctors do to other institutions; that is, they have an intimate knowledge and control of the system which enables them to guide its working in partial independence of the rest of society. They do this partly to the end of public service and partly to their own private advantage; all technical classes, in one way or another, exploiting the institutions in their charge for their own aggrandizement. If the clergy have done this, we may assume that other classes will also: indeed it is mostly unconscious and involves no peculiar moral reproach. Much also is done that cannot be called exploitation, which may greatly affect values. The commercially ascendant class has not only most of the tangible power, but the prestige and initiative which, for better or worse, may be even more influential. It sets fashions, perhaps of fine ideals, perhaps of gross dissipations, which permeate society and control the market.

To this we must, of course, add the concentration of actual buying power in the richer class, which is largely the same as the commercial class. The general result is that psychical values, in the course of getting pecuniary expression, pass through and are moulded by the minds of people of wealth and business function to an extent not easily overstated.

In close connection with this factor of class we have the existence of certain legal institutions, of which the rights of inheritance and bequest are the most conspicuous, that enormously aid the concentration of pecuniary power, and hence of control over pecuniary values, in a comparatively small group. However defensible these rights may be, all things considered, it is the simple truth that the concentration and continuity they appear to involve seriously discredit, in practice, all theories of economic freedom, and make it necessary to look for the pecuniary recognition of values largely to the good-will of the class that has most of the pecuniary power. The view that the administration of the value system can be in any sense democratic must rest, under these conditions, upon the belief that democratic ideals will permeate the class in question, in spite of its somewhat oligarchic position.

Let us not forget, however, that class-control, of some kind or degree, lies in the nature of organization, so that its presence in the pecuniary institution is nothing extraordinary. Whether, or in what respects, it is an evil calling for reform, I shall not now consider.

Interwoven with the influence of class is that of the institutional process, of the fact that pecuniary valuation works through an established mechanism, and that it can translate into pecuniary terms only such values as have conformed to certain conditions. In general, values can be expressed in the market only as they have become the object of extended recognition in some exchangeable form, and so of regular pecuniary competition. To attain to this they must be felt in the organized opinion of a considerable social group, from which the competitors are to come, and they must also, in a measure, be standardized; that is, the degrees and kinds of value must be defined, so that regular and precise transactions are possible.

Suppose that we consider again the case of the sculptor, and assume that he is a young man who has begun to produce statues of a high and unique æsthetic worth. In order that these shall have a pecuniary value adequate to their merit, it is not sufficient that here and there an isolated critic or connoisseur shall be strongly impressed by them. Such a situation does not establish a market: there must be discussion, a continuous communicating group must arise, including connoisseurs and wealthy amateurs subject to their influence, the merits of the painter and of his several works must be in a manner conventionalized, so that regular competition is set up and a continuous series of prices established.

A better illustration, for some purposes, would be one in which the social group includes both consumers and producers, the latter stimulated by the appreciation of the group, and at the same time contributing to it by expert leadership, the group as a whole thus advancing both the type of values and its pecuniary standing. This might be the case with the painter and his public, but perhaps expert golf-players and the makers of golf-clubs would be a better example. I suppose that the sport is socially organized, in the sense just indicated, and that this enables a regular progress in function and in its pecuniary recognition. The makers turn out better and better clubs and get well paid for them. Almost any branch of applied science will also afford good illustrations, as mechanical engineering, or the manufacture of electrical apparatus.

Something of this kind must take place with all new values seeking pecuniary expression. It is not enough that they are felt by individuals, no matter how many, in a vague and scattered way: they must achieve a kind of system.

To put it otherwise, the progress of market valuation, as a rule, is a translation into pecuniary terms of values which have already become, in some measure, a social institution. A new design in dress, no matter how attractive, means nothing on the market until it has become the fashion (or is believed to be in a way to become so); then you can hardly buy anything else; and the principle is of wide application. Inventions and discoveries, however pregnant, will commonly have no market standing except as they have an evident power to contribute to pecuniary values already established. If you write an original treatise in some branch of science, you are lucky if it pays the cost of publication, but if you can prepare a text-book that meets the institutional demand for the same science, you may look for affluence.

Or, to apply the principle to the highest sphere of all, there is a sense in which it is true that the greater a moral value is the less is its pecuniary recognition. That is, if righteous innovation, the moral heroism of the heretics who foreshadow better institutions, is the greatest good, then the greater the good the less the pay. This is not because moral value is essentially non-pecuniary—people will pay for righteousness as readily, perhaps, as for anything else, when they feel it as such, and when it presents itself in negotiable form—but because pecuniary valuation is essentially an institution, and values which are anti-institutional naturally stand outside of it.

A value that is standard in a powerful institution never fails, I think, of pecuniary recognition. In a certain church a certain type of clergyman can get a good salary: to understand why, you must study the history of the institution.

You may say that this is contrary to the well-known fact that a high premium is everywhere put upon initiative and originality. But if you look closer you will find that these qualities, in order to be well paid, must have a demonstrable power to enhance pecuniary values already on the market. An advertising man with a genius for novel and efficacious appeal may demand a great salary, but if he devotes the same genius to radical agitation he may not be allowed to hold any job at all. It is possible, no doubt, to extend considerably the means by which fruitful originality is anticipated and pecuniary recognition prepared for it, as is done, for example, in the endowment of research. The trouble here is to provide any standard of originality which shall not become conventional, and so, in practice, merely perpetuate an institution. Even the endowment of research, like fellowships in theological institutions, has in some degree this effect.

We hear a great deal nowadays to the effect that the values of scholars and teachers lack pecuniary appreciation and security in the universities, that boards of trustees do not understand the finer kinds of merit and often use the funds under their control to employ men of business or administrative capacity rather than in evoking or attracting notable men of the type to further which universities exist; also that men are under pressure (indirectly pecuniary) not to teach anything repugnant to the ascendant commercialism, which the authorities unconsciously represent. In so far as this is true the remedy would seem to be to define and promote the type, to make clear in academic groups and in public opinion what the higher merits are, so that every board will be intelligently eager to secure them; in a word, to foster the institution, in the highest sense, and insist that complete freedom of function shall be a part of it.

So the question of social betterment, in terms of valuation, is largely a question of imparting to the psychical values that we believe to represent betterment such precision and social recognition as shall give them pecuniary standing, and add the inducement of market demand to whatever other forces may be working for their realization. There are, of course, other methods which may be of equal or greater efficacy; but this is one with which no reform can altogether dispense. Thus the movement which is making “social work” a regular profession, with definite requirements of capacity and training, established methods and ideals, and a market price in the way of salaries for those that are competent, is a momentous thing in this field. Not only does it mean pecuniary recognition for the humanitarian value of individuals, but, through the institution of a class having such values at heart, all kinds of ideas and measures working in this direction are assured of organized support. The new profession should do for its province what the legal profession (in spite of shortcomings) does for justice, or the medical for health. No doubt something is lost in passing from the heroic innovator to the standard worker on a salary; but it is thus that we get ahead, and that the way is opened for higher kinds of innovation.

If we wish a general term to bring out the antithesis between pecuniary values and those which are high, psychically, but non-pecuniary, we may call the latter progress-values. Progress-values, in this somewhat arbitrary sense, would be those which are not yet incorporated into the pecuniary institution, but which, because of their intrinsic worth to human life, deserve to be, and presumably will be. As that takes place they will, of course, cease to be progress-values, because the pecuniary institution will have caught up with them. Such values, otherwise regarded, may be æsthetic, scientific, moral, industrial; may in fact pertain to any field of life which admits of progress. The labor-saving invention which no one, as yet, is willing to pay for has an industrial progress-value, and similarly with the paintings of Corot before the appreciating group has made a market for them.

It will be understood that the more obvious examples of non-pecuniary progress-values are to be expected in those social processes which are remote from or opposed to the economic institution, so that pecuniary recognition is correspondingly impeded. In literature, science, and religion they are ever conspicuous (in retrospect, that is), and still more so in what relates to those fundamental social reforms of which the pecuniary system, as a part of the establishment, is the natural enemy.

I need hardly add that progress-values belong, like moral and æsthetic values, among those which have power over the human spirit, but which, for the very reason that they are not the expression of a definite institution, cannot be precisely ascertained.

Probably the more flagrant shortcomings of market valuation at the present time are due in part to a rather anarchic state of the economic system itself, considered as a mechanism, but also, quite as much, to a weakness and confusion in the higher kinds of organization, of which economic demand should be the expression. The market is largely under the control of two sorts of values, both of which may be called anti-progressive: institutional values of a somewhat outworn and obstructive kind, and human-nature values whose crudity reflects the present lack among us of the finer kinds of culture groups and disciplines. By outworn institutional values I mean, for example, the ideals of pecuniary self-assertion and display which we get, at least in their more extravagant forms, from the regnant commercialism; also the ideals of a superficial refinement, expressing social superiority rather than beauty, which we inherit from a society based on caste. Crude human-nature values may be illustrated by the various forms of sensuality and unedifying amusement for which we spend so lavishly. The road to something higher, in both these regards, seems to lie through the growth of such group disciplines as I have suggested.

We particularly need such disciplines in those fields of production which are most distinctly economic in that they are most completely within the control of the pecuniary institution—production, chiefly, of material goods for the ordinary uses of life. At the present time producers, in great part, are guided by no ideals of group function and service, but merely by the commercial principle of making what they can sell. This attitude is anti-progressive, however matter-of-course it may seem, because the social group in performance of a given function is primarily responsible for its betterment. A shoe-manufacturer is no more justified in making the worst shoes he can sell than an artist in painting the worst pictures. Only as we all idealize our functions can progress-values come in. And the consumers, upon whom the commercial principle throws the whole responsibility, also lack high standards, and organized means of enforcing those they have. The whole situation, so far as it is of this kind, tends to the degradation of quality.

Production has not always lacked ideals, nor does it everywhere lack them at present. They come when the producing group gets a corporate consciousness and a sense of the social worth of its function. The mediæval guilds developed high traditions and standards of workmanship, and held their members to them. They thought of themselves in terms of service, and not merely as purveyors to a demand. In our time the same is to some extent true of trades and professions in which a sense of workmanship has been developed by tradition and training. Doctors and lawyers are not content to give us what we want in their line, but hold it their duty to teach us what we ought to want, to refuse things that are not for our best good and urge upon us those that are. Artists, teachers, men of letters, do the same. A good carpenter, if you give him the chance, will build a better house than the owner can appreciate; he loves to do it and feels obscurely that it is his part to realize an ideal of sound construction. The same principle ought to hold good throughout society, each functional group forming ideals of its own function and holding its members to them. Consuming and producing groups should co-operate in this matter, each making requirements which the other might overlook. The somewhat anarchical condition that is now common we may hope to be transitory. The general rule is that a stable group has a tendency to create for itself ideals of service in accord with the ruling ideals of society at large.

Perhaps we shall succeed in achieving the higher values only as we embody them in a system of appealing images by the aid of art. We need to see society—see it beautiful and inspiring—as a whole and in its special meaning for us, building up the conception of democracy until it stands before us with the grandeur and detail of great architecture. Then we shall have a source of higher values from which the pecuniary channels, as well as others, will be fed.^[74]

The societies of the past have done this in their own way; they have had the state and the church, heroes, dignitaries, traditions and symbols, a visible whole which engaged the devotion of men and served as the spring of ideal values. Montesquieu, with his eyes on France, wrote that honor was the principle of monarchy, which “sets all the parts of the body politic in motion,” the fount of honor being the king, and its awards depending, ideally, on public service, as that was understood at the time. We must do it in a new way, our own democratic way; but it must be done. There must be the ideals, the symbols, the devotion, the detailed and cogent interpretation for every phase of life.

It is not hard to find going on about us examples of the way in which an onward movement, expressing itself in any of the social institutions, may pass thence into the pecuniary system. Consider, for instance, the movement for vocational selection and specialized education in the schools. It is evident that the spirit of our democracy is bent on developing competent leadership and technical efficiency in all phases of its higher life. As this idea becomes organized it creates a demand for teachers and specialists of every sort which the growth of society is seen to require, and prices are set upon their services high enough to insure the supply. If the public mind sees the need of forestry, a supply of trained foresters, sufficiently well paid, is presently at hand. These in turn, acting as leaders, stimulate and guide public opinion, and a growth of organization and of values takes place along the line of vital impulse.

Of the same character is the rise and effectuation of an art spirit, which we are witnessing. The public mind, somewhat weary of a monotonous commercialism, has begun to turn, vaguely but resolutely, toward æsthetic production and enjoyment. There are a hundred manifestations of this, but none more significant than the rise of art-handicraft teaching in the schools. No one can say how far this will go, but there is no apparent reason why it should stop short of restoring that union of life with art which our recent development has so generally destroyed. If so, the effect in creating higher types of commercial value, in commodities and in men, will be beyond estimate. The spirit of art makes men desire to surround themselves with objects upon which the craftsman has impressed a joyous personal feeling, precisely as the lover of literature needs to surround himself with books of which this is true. It is essentially a demand for personal expression, and implies a real, though perhaps indirect, understanding between the workman and the consumer. In so far, then, as it prevails it evokes a class of handicraftsmen whose work is individual and inspiriting, partly counteracting the deadening effect of wholesale and impersonal methods. Thus there will come to be a growing number of independent and well-paid men, many of them dealing directly with the consumer, engaged upon work as delightful as any that life affords.

Wholesale production will doubtless continue, because of its economy, but even as regards this we note that variety and personal interest in the work are coming to have a market value as they are seen to promote contentment and efficiency in the worker.

The whole matter of fashion, especially of fashion in dress, might well be discussed from this point of view. Although it has been the subject of futile satire and protest so long as to seem hopeless, it is not so unless we are prepared to admit that we are incapable of a real self-expression in this part of life. Competent leadership, along with the general growth of æsthetic culture and democratic sentiment, should make this possible.

It is plain, also, that in any plan of reform of values through demand the mind of women must have a great part. In so far as this mind seems at present to fluctuate between conventionalism and anarchy, the cause, perhaps, is that it lacks the guidance and discipline that might come from the better organization of women as a social group. The working of this should be analogous to that of the professional groups I have cited, and should have a like power to raise the quality of the pecuniary values which women control. The critical question here is, will women, under conditions of freedom, develop a group consciousness of their own, with high ideals of each function and power to discipline the less responsible of their sex. It is hard to see how modern civilization can dispense with something of this kind. We seem to have abandoned compulsory discipline, and self-discipline is much needed to take its place—or rather to do what the other could never have done: make women full participants in democratic progress.

As regards a better pecuniary valuation of men, the same principles hold, in general, as for other kinds of pecuniary progress. It calls for the development of service values, along with the social organization necessary to appreciate and define these and secure for them pecuniary recognition. No social manipulation can be trusted to make people pay high prices for poor service, nor will good service secure an adequate reward without social structure to back it. The natural process is one of the concomitant development, through a continuing group, of service values and pecuniary appreciation.

Certainly we need a scientific and thoroughgoing cultivation of personal productive power. This should include the study of potential capacity in children, vocational guidance, practical training, and social culture. We require also a practical eugenics, which shall diminish the propagation of degenerate types and perhaps apply more searching tests to immigrants. We need, in short, a comprehensive “scientific management” of mankind, to the end of better personal opportunity and social function in every possible line. But inseparable from this is the whole question of democratic social development through the state and other institutions, every phase of which should tend to improve the general position, and through that the market power, of the unprivileged masses of the people.

To put it otherwise, the institutional forces supporting market values vary not only in different occupation groups, but along lines of general class position, and in the case of those classes that are handicapped by an unfavorable economic situation the weakness of these forces offers an urgent problem, which the labor movement, in the largest sense, is an endeavor to solve.

I do not anticipate that the struggle of classes over pecuniary distribution will go to any great extremes. It seems more probable that facility of intercourse, democratic education, underlying community of interest, and the large human spirit that is growing upon us, will maintain a working solidarity. Common ideals of some sort will pervade the whole people; and they cannot be ideals dictated by any one class. They must be such as can be made acceptable to an intelligent democracy, and will rule the minds of rich and poor alike; no class will be able to shut them out. They will be violated, but only in the clandestine way that all accepted principles are violated. Whoever has wealth, whoever has power, I am inclined to think that the sway of the public mind will be such as to insure the use of these, in the main, for what is regarded as the common welfare.

In spite of the rank growth of many abuses, our society is comparatively free from the more stubborn obstacles to democratic betterment. I mean long-settled habits and traditions whose spirit is opposed to such betterment. Our theory, our formal organization, our training, are all favorable to rational democracy. The domination of a commercial class, so far as it exists, is but a mushroom growth, and those who, to their own surprise, find themselves exercising it, have no deep belief in its justice or permanence. It is an economic fact, but not a tradition or a faith. It is but a slight thing compared with the indurated mediævalism and militarism of Europe. Our people have not only democratic ideals, but a well-grounded faith in their ability to realize them.