In all stages of social development the economic motives that actuate men remain essentially the same. All men seek to get as much net service from material wealth as they can. The more wealth they have, other things remaining the same, the better off they are, and the more personal sacrifice they are compelled to undergo in the securing of the wealth, the worse off they are. Some of the benefit received is neutralized 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.