It has already been said that the law developed in the previous chapters is not a rival to that which makes value determined by the relations of Supply and Demand, but a more adequate expression of it. So, in the last three chapters, the emphasis necessary to prove a difficult proposition may have given the impression that the present law is put forward in contradiction of the determination of price, in the great majority of cases, by costs of production. It may, then, be as well to remember that the work of the Austrian school is a quest for the _fundamental_ law of value. In the complicated circumstances of modern industry, it is not easy to see the real nexus of cause and effect. In a developed market, where production speculates on demand, value naturally assumes the appearance of being determined beforehand. Human wants are tempted, as it were, instead of giving the initiative. Thus the impression is easily got, and with difficulty got rid of, that human want will pay the price which production dictates, the fact being that production must, in the long run, conform to the nature and measure of human want. And thus also, I am afraid, comes the idea, certainly common among the employing classes, that wages are dictated by them from above, instead of being produced by the labourers themselves—an idea degenerating in many cases into the belief that combinations of workers to secure their share in the product are illegitimate interferences with capital. What is contended is that the Law of Cost is a good working secondary law as regards articles reproducible at will under large and organised production; that is, of course, as regards the vast majority of goods produced. But it has always been taught by economists that it did not hold outside these cases. On the other hand, the Law of Marginal Utility is claimed as the universal and fundamental law of value. It has not been difficult to prove its validity in the simpler cases; and if now, in the later chapters, our law has been shown to be the real background of the empirical Law of Cost, the contention is justified.