lized by the sacrifice incurred; but there is a net surplus of
gains not thus canceled by sacrifices, and the generic motive which
may properly be called economic is the desire to make this surplus
large. Except in a perfectly isolated individual life, there is
opportunity for ethical motives to affect men's economic actions.
Altruism has a place in any _social_ system of economics, and so have
the sense of justice and the positive compulsion of the law. Altruism
does its largest work in causing men to give away wealth after they
have acquired it, but conscience and the law powerfully affect their
actions in acquiring it. These are forces of which Social Economics
has to take account; but the more egoistic motive, desire to secure
the largest net benefit from the wealth-creating process, is one of
the premises of any economic science. This involves a general pursuit
of wealth; but men seek the wealth for a certain personal effect
which comes from the use of it, and they measure it, when attained, by
means of this subjective effect.

_How Specific Utilities are Measured._--As the essential quality of
wealth is specific effective utility, we measure wealth by estimating
the amount of this quality, and it is always a consumer who must make
the measurement. He must discover the importance to himself of a small
quantity of a particular commodity. The hunter must find out how much
worse off he would be if he were to lose a small part of his supply of
game and endure some hunger as a consequence. In doing this he gets
the measure of the effective utility of any like quantity of game,
since any one specific part of his supply is as important as any other
and no more so. The estimate of the importance of such a supply of
food material has to be made in this specific way, by taking the
amount on hand piece by piece, and not by gauging the importance of
the whole of it at once.

_Value the Measure of Specific Effective Utility._--If any consumer
will estimate the importance to himself of a single unit of goods of a
certain kind, and multiply the measure so gained by the number of
units he is appraising, he will make a measurement of the value of the
total amount.

_Values not based on the Importance of the Total Supply of Goods._--It
is essential that the consumer, in determining the value of a kind of
goods, should not estimate the importance of the supply in its
entirety, since that would give an exaggerated measure. Measurem