These classes, in fact, occupy a prominent position in the Wealth of Nations. But this only shows us that the author, after having given a definition, found himself straitened by it, and, consequently, that that definition is erroneous. Adam Smith would not have gained his great and just renown had he not written his magnificent chapters on Education, on the Clergy, and on Public Services, and if he had, in treating of Wealth, confined himself within the limits of his own definition. Happily, by this inconsistency, he freed himself from the fetters which his premises imposed upon him. This always happens. A man of genius who sets out with a false principle never escapes inconsistency, without which he would get deeper and deeper into error, and, far from appearing a man of genius, would show himself no longer a man of sense. As Adam Smith advanced a step beyond the Physiocrates, Jean Baptiste Say advanced a step beyond Smith. By degrees Say was led to refer value to services, but only by way of analogy. It is in the product that he discovers true value, and nothing shows this better than his whimsical denomination of services as “immaterial products”—two words which absolutely shriek out on finding themselves side by side. Say, in the outset, agrees with Smith; for the entire theory of the master is to be found in the first ten lines of the work of the disciple.[38] But he thought and meditated on the subject for thirty years, and he made progress. He approximated more and more to the truth, without ever fully attaining it. Moreover, we might have imagined that Say did his duty as an Economist as well by referring the value of the service to the product, as by referring the value of the product to the service, if the Socialist propaganda, founding on his own deductions, had not come to reveal to us the insufficiency and the danger of his principle. The question I propose, then, is this:—Seeing that certain products are possessed of value, seeing that certain services are possessed of value, and seeing that value is one and identical, and can have but one origin, one foundation, one explanation,—is this origin, this explanation to be found in the product or in the service? The reply to that question is obvious, and for this unanswerable [p174] reason, that every product which has value implies service, but every service does not necessarily imply a product. This appears to me mathematically certain—conclusive. A service, as such, has value, whether it assume a material form or not. A material object has value if, in transferring it to another, we render him a service,—if not, it has no value. Then value does not proceed from the material object to the service, but from the service to the material object.