There is a rough, but sometimes convenient, division of goods into Necessaries, Comforts, and Luxuries. Corresponding with this classification of goods, we might consider the physical needs satisfied by “necessaries” as the most important; and in the first rank of utilities, therefore, we should put goods necessary to sustain life, such as food, clothes, shelter. Next would come health and fulness of life, and in the second rank of utilities we should put good food, good clothes, good shelter. Last we should put the refinements or the artificial appetites of life, and, corresponding with these, we should have music and pictures, liquor, tobacco, and so on. It is easy to see that the sanction or principle of this scale is a negative one. It is not based on the satisfaction we get from goods, but on the consequences which will ensue to our lives if these wants go unsatisfied. Food is in the first rank of goods, because here death follows unsatisfied need. Tobacco is in a subordinate place, because the want of it causes, at worst, discomfort. And diamonds come in the lowest rank of useful goods because the loss of them involves a quite trifling loss of wellbeing. Here is a scale of wants with a definite enough principle. But it is a scale adapted to circumstances so simple as to have no resemblance to any known form of society. Possibly the economists’ favourite classic, Robinson Crusoe, has had something to do with the making of it. Certainly there never was a people who divided out their labour to satisfy successively the wants of such a scale, not producing anything for fulness of life till all had the necessaries, nor anything for pleasure till all had the necessaries of efficiency. Such a division of labour would evidence a higher level of reason and self-restraint than our communities have reached, since it would be founded on a deliberate theory of social life. The very suggestion that the loss of diamonds is “trifling” would justify the reproach one has sometimes to bear, that “it is well seen political economy was written by men!” The fact remains that this is nobody’s scale: the poorest savage, the worst paid mill-girl, the most refined woman, will put ornament only second to bare necessaries.