nvert it into agony. These and other difficulties imply
the hopelessness of searching for this chimerical unit of 'utility'
when considered as a separate thing. It shifts and escapes from our
hands directly we grasp it. Ricardo discusses some of these points in
his interesting chapter on 'Value and Riches.' Gold, he says, may cost
two thousand times more than iron, but it is certainly not two
thousand times as useful.[326] Suppose, again, that some invention
enables you to make more luxuries by the same labour, you increase
wealth but not value. There will be, say, twice as many hats, but each
hat may have half its former value. There will be more things to
enjoy, but they will only exchange for the same quantity of other
things. That is, he says, the amount of 'riches' varies, while the
amount of value is fixed. This, according to him, proves that value
does not vary with 'utility.' 'Utility,' as he declares in his first
chapter, is 'absolutely essential to value,' but it is 'not the
measure of exchangeable value.'[327] A solution of these puzzles may
be sought in any modern text-book. Ricardo escapes by an apparently
paradoxical conclusion. He is undertaking an impossible problem when
he starts from the buyers' desire of an 'utility.' Therefore he turns
from the buyers to the sellers. The seller has apparently a measurable
and definable motive--the desire to make so much per cent. on his
capital.[328] Ricardo, unfortunately, speaks as though the two parties
to the bargain somehow represented mutually exclusive processes.
'Supply and demand' determine the value of 'monopolised articles,' but
the cost of other articles depends _not_ 'on the state of demand and
supply,' _but_ 'on the increased or diminished cost of their
production.'[329] Why 'not' and 'but'? If supply and demand
corresponds to the whole play of motives which determines the bargain,
this is like saying, according to the old illustration, that we must
attribute the whole effect of a pair of scissors to one blade and not
to the other. His view leads to the apparent confusion of taking for
the cause of value not our desire for a thing, but the sacrifice we
must make to attain it. Bentham[330] said, for example, that Ricardo
confused 'cost' with 'value.' The denial that utility must in some
sense or other determine value perplexes an intelligible and
consistent meaning. It is clearly true, upon his postulates, that the
value of goods, other than 'monopolised,