Yet it seems that it must have been a scale something like this by which the older economists measured utility. In the interpretation they gave to “use value,” they assumed that utility is relative to mere physical life. Those who speak of diamonds having no use-value, and of food as having infinite use-value, must be drawing their ideas, not from the life of men but from the life of cattle. It is possible to draw out a scientific catalogue of what things and amounts and conditions will put a sheep or bullock into the best condition for the market, just as it is possible to consider the human labourer as a force of so many foot-pounds. But the economic end of the sheep is—mutton, while the economic end of labour is—the labourer. That is to say, the “life” by which economists, as distinguished from butchers, must measure utility, is the life of a spiritual being for whom and towards whom all economic effort exists. To such a being, it is inconceivable that bread should have the highest use-value and diamonds none at all. Compared with this purely theoretical scale, let us inquire of facts as to the scale which men in ordinary life adopt as regards goods. Consciously or unconsciously, every man whose means or wealth or resources are more limited than his wants—and this is, practically, the case with human beings generally—has a scale of wants in his mind when he arranges his expenditure. On the basis of this scale, he satisfies what are his more urgent wants, and leaves the less urgent unsatisfied. But which are the more urgent wants on his scale? Are they determined by anything like the classification just mentioned? If so, how is it that a tramp with sixpence in his pocket will spend threepence on a bed in a lodging house, a penny on bread, and twopence on tobacco?