ds according to the law of what has been called _final
utility_ or, in another view, effective specific utility, and he will
also test the comparative usefulness of his various tools by an appeal
to the law of final or specific productivity.

_Social Economy the Chief Subject of Study._--We care most to know how
an organized society produces and uses its wealth, and in making this
inquiry we encounter at once phenomena that are not universal. The
civilized society creates its wealth cooeperatively, by the joint
action of its various members; that is, it proceeds by means of a
division of labor and an exchanging of products. Moreover, it has, in
some way, to share the sum total of its gains among its various
members. It has to apportion labor among different occupations for the
sake of collective production, which is a grand synthetic operation
whereby each man puts something into a common total which is the
income of all society. It has, further, to divide the grand total into
shares for its different members--an analytical operation in which
each man takes something out of the aggregate for his personal use.
This is distribution in the narrower sense of that term--the
apportionment among the members of a civilized society of the fruits
of production. In the wider sense the term also includes the
apportionment of the sacrifices incurred in the joint production.
Distribution, as thus defined, is the element that appears in economic
life in consequence of social organization. This is a secondary
element, indeed; for man, nature and their relations and interactions
are the primary facts, and the relations of men to each other come
logically after these. Social organization, however, is so
transforming in its effects as to reduce to small proportions the
amount of attention it is worth our while to devote to the economy of
the primitive types of life. It is necessary to make some study of
that economy, for it is thus that we place before ourselves the fact
that there are universal economic laws and perceive distinctly the
nature of some of the more important of them.

_Facts Peculiar to Socialized Industry._--The term _Political Economy_
denotes a science of industry[1] as thus socialized, for it is a
science of the wealth which is produced in an organized way by the
people of a more or less civilized state. The general truths which we
have thus far stated apply to such an economy, indeed, but they also
apply to the wealt