public house, but it would also have to be allowed that the discussion of the most efficient way by keeping a public house was outside the scope of the moral enquiry. Mrs Weir of Hermiston was confusing economics with ethics when she answered Lord Braxfield's complaints of his ill-cooked dinner by saying that the cook was a very pious woman. Economic action according to Croce is the condition of moral action. If action has no economic value, it is merely aimless, but it may have economic value without being moral, and the consideration of economic value must therefore be independent of ethics. Marx, Croce holds was an economist and not a moralist, and the moral judgments of socialists are not and cannot be derived from any scientific examination of economic processes. So much for criticisms of Marx or rather of exaggerated developments of Marxianism, which though just and important, are comparatively obvious. The most interesting part of Signor Croce's criticism is his interpretation of the shibboleth of orthodox Marxians and the stumbling-block of economists, the Marxian theory of labour value with its corollary of surplus value. Marx's exposition of the doctrine in _Das Kapital_ is the extreme of abstract reasoning. Yet it is found in a book full of concrete descriptions of the evils of the factory system and of moral denunciation and satire. If Marx's theory be taken as an account of what determines the actual value of concrete things it is obviously untrue. The very use of the term surplus value is sufficient to show that it might be and sometimes is taken to be the value which commodities ought to have, but none can read Marx's arguments and think that he was concerned with a value which should but did not exist. He is clearly engaged on a scientific not a Utopian question.