We shall find the Valuable separating itself naturally from the Useful if we look at what are called the free gifts of nature. Air, water, light, are recognised by every one as useful. But are they valuable? Most people—economists without knowing it—would answer in the negative, although certainly there is reason to suspect that they base this answer on the fact that they “could not get anything for them.” Again, those scarce things which we seem to value just because they are scarce (as rare statues, pictures, books, coins, wines made from grapes of one limited locality, etc., to use Ricardo’s examples), have always a background of usefulness, as satisfying some social, or class, or individual desire. Evidently Usefulness or Utility is the larger conception of the two, and embraces Value. But if all valuable things are useful, while all useful things are not valuable, value must emerge at some particular limiting point of utility. Value, then, will be based on utility—utility limited in some particular way, but still utility.[7] [7] It is perhaps a pity on two grounds that the word “utility” should have been adopted by economic science:—(1) that the word seems to suggest things really useful, when it means no more than things desired, bought, and sold; (2) that it has so often suggested to shallow thinkers that Political Economy is a “sordid science” whose investigations do not go beyond mere material considerations. CHAPTER III THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN UTILITY AND VALUE Utility and not Value, says Wieser, is “the supreme principle of all economy; where value and utility come into conflict, utility must conquer.” The statement is suggestive. The economic goal of civilisation is to turn the whole natural environment of man from a relation of hostility or indifference into a relation of utility. Certain goods we have from nature without money and without price, and the incessant effort of the industrial world is _in the direction_ of bringing all goods nearer to that category. Indeed, some of the necessaries of life have already been brought so nearly to that condition that states and municipalities occasionally pay the small remaining price, and distribute them as heaven does the rain. The effort to improve production generally is nothing else than the effort to multiply utilities and, as consequence, to reduce their price. For, while value reflects utility, the mirror is too small to hold all the picture. To use Wieser’s words again, “Value is the calculation-form of utility”—an expression which will be appreciated if we realise how impossible it is to estimate the utility of a harvest, how easy to calculate its amount and its price.