ep. His dream is not so dangerous as the contrasted dream of
the socialist, now threatening to walk abroad in his sleep, but both in
their degree are dreams and nothing more.

The real truth is that prices and wages and all the various payments
from hand to hand in industrial society, are the outcome of a complex of
competing forces that are not based upon justice but upon "economic
strength." To elucidate this it is necessary to plunge into the jungle
of pure economic theory. The way is arduous. There are no flowers upon
the path. And out of this thicket, alas, no two people ever emerge hand
in hand in concord. Yet it is a path that must be traversed. Let us
take, then, as a beginning the very simplest case of the making of a
price. It is the one which is sometimes called in books on economics the
case of an unique monopoly. Suppose that I offer for sale the manuscript
of the Pickwick Papers, or Shakespere's skull, or, for the matter of
that, the skull of John Smith, what is the sum that I shall receive for
it? It is the utmost that any one is willing to give for it. That is all
one can say about it. There is no question here of cost or what I paid
for the article or of anything else except the amount of the
willingness to pay on the part of the highest bidder. It would be
possible, indeed, for a bidder to take the article from me by force. But
this we presume to be prevented by the law, and for this reason we
referred above not to the physical strength, but to the "economic
strength" of the parties to a bargain. By this is meant the relation
that arises out of the condition of the supply and the demand, the
willingness or eagerness, or the sheer necessity, of the buyers and the
sellers. People may offer much because the thing to be acquired is an
absolute necessity without which they perish; a drowning man would sell
all that he had for a life belt. Or they may offer much through the
sheer abundance of their other possessions. A millionaire might offer
more for a life belt as a souvenir than a drowning man could pay for it
to save his life.

Yet out of any particular conjunction between desires on the one hand
and goods or services on the other arises a particular equation of
demand and supply, represented by a particular price. All of this, of
course, is A. B. C., and I am not aware that anybody doubts it.

Now let us make the example a little more elaborate. Suppose that one
single person owned all the food supply